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IN PREPARATION 

FOR THE SAME SERIES: 

KANT'S ETHICS. President Porter 

KANT'S CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT. Prof. Robert Adamsox. 

SCHELLING'S TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM. Prof. John 
Watson. 

HEGEL"S LOGIC. Dr. Wm. T. Harris. 

HEGEL'S ^ESTHETICS. Prof. J. S. Kedne. 



GERMAN PHILOSOPHICAL CLASSICS 

FOR 

ENGLISH READERS AND STUDENTS. 



EDITED BY 



GEORGE S. MORRIS. 



KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 



KANT'S 



CRITIQUE OF PDRE REASON. 



A CRITICAL EXPOSITION 



By GEORGE S. MORRIS, Ph.D. 

PROFESSOR OF ETHICS, HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY AND LOGIC IN THE 

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, AND LECTURER ON PHILOSOPHY 

IN THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, BALTIMORE. 



ERRATUM.— ¥01 author of HEGEL'S .ESTHETICS read 
Prof. J. S. Kidney, 




CHICAGO: 
8. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY. 

1882. 



•'X 



y 



Copyright, 1882, 
By S. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY. 



[ KNIGHT & LEOKARD . ) 



PREFACE. 



THE present volume appears as the first one 
in a proposed series of ,; German Philosophic 
Classics for English Readers and Students," con- 
cerning which, in a printed " Prospectus." the fol- 
lowing was said: 

" Each volume will be devoted to the critical expo- 
sition of some one masterpiece belonging to the his- 
tory of German philosophy. The aim in each case 
will be to furnish a clear and attractive statement 
of the special substance and purport of the original 
author's argument, to interpret and elucidate the 
same by reference to the historic and acknowledged 
results of philosophic inquiry, to give an independ- 
ent estimate of merits and deficiencies, and espe- 
cially to show, as occasion may require, in what way 
German thought contains the natural complement, 
or the much-needed corrective, of British specula- 
tion. 

" It is intended that the series, when completed, 
shall consist of ten or twelve volumes, founded on 
the works of Leibnitz. Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and 
Hegel. It will thus furnish in effect a history of 
the most conspicuous and permanently influential 
movement in the history of German thought, and 
its general object may be stated to be to render rea- 



VI PREFACE. 

sonably accessible to the intelligent English reader 
a knowledge of German philosophic thought in its 
leading outlines, and at the same time to furnish 
the special student with a valuable introduction and 
guide to more comprehensive studies in the same 
direction. " 

Whatever judgment may be passed concerning the 
measure in which the present volume fulfils the 
promise of the prospectus, its author, as responsi- 
ble editor of the whole series, refers with confidence 
to the names of the eminent scholars and teachers, 
who have promised to prepare other volumes, as fur- 
nishino' a sufficient guarantee that the series as a 
whole will worthily realize its published aim. 

To the special student of Kant, the difficulties 
which must attend the attempt to furnish a summary 
account of the " special substance and purport " of 
the " Critique of Pure Reason " are well known. Not 
the least of these difficulties arises from the circum- 
stance that Kant's work marks and conspicuously 
illustrates a stadium of transition in the history of 
modern thought. It is far more eminently the' story 
of a process of inquiry and demonstration than a 
didactic exposition of finished results. And with 
reference to this process the terminus a quo and the 
terminus ad quern are widely different. Hence, as 
the inquiry proceeds, words and phrases acquire, and 
have attached to them, new meanings. This produces 
an air of variability and uncertainty in the use of 
words, which Kant, owing, doubtless, in part, to the 
haste with which his work was written, has not taken 



PREFACE. Vll 

care to reduce to a minimum. Add to this the fact 
that Kant's intellectual attitude, in some of its most 
essential aspects, remains, to the end, thoroughly con- 
fused, and the reader will have some conception of 
the hindrances which lie in the way of an attempt to 
produce a " clear and attractive statement' 1 of w r hat 
Kant has to say. These things are mentioned, not to 
excuse any deficiencies in the work of the present 
author, but that the critical reader may not at the 
outset form a wholly unreasonable notion of what 
may justly be demanded in any professed exposition 
of Kant. 

The author has had at his disposal a copious col- 
lection of works, old and new, relating to Kant. 
But as his primary object in the preparation of this 
volume was not to make a new contribution to 
;, Kant philology." they could not serve him, or influ- 
ence his judgment, in any such conspicuous measure 
as to make further, specific mention of them neces- 
sary. His best and most earnest wish is that this 
volume, and the series which it inaugurates, may 
serve the end of promoting genuine philosophic in- 
telligence. 

GEO. S. MOERIS. 

May 3, 1882. 



CONTENTS. 



INTRODUCTION. 

Apparently contradictory character of philo- 
sophical works 1 

Philosophy the Science of Being .... 2 

Its practical importance 3 

Science of Being dependent on Science of Ex- 
perience, or of Knowledge 5 

From different views respecting the nature of 
knowledge result different conceptions regard- 
ing the nature or knowableness of being . 8 

According to one view, knowledge is a purely 
mechanical process 11 

The logical result of this view is not science, 
but nescience 13 

Its practical result is materialistic . . . . 17 

Knowledge is a more than merely mechanical 
process 19 

It is an organic process, and the Science of 
Knowledge, as such a process, leads directly 
to a spiritualistic Science of Being ... 22 



X CONTENTS. 

Agnosticism, or Practical Materialism, is an 

uncalled for apotheosis of physical science . 24 
Prevalence of mechanical conceptions in modern 

philosophy before Kant 29 

Kant's early predilection for physical science . 33 

Kant under the influence of British empiricism 34 

Disturbed by Hume 37 

Publication of the three Critiques .... 38 
^General purport of the " Critique of Pure 

Reason " 40 

The peculiar service rendered through it to 
philosophy .41 



CHAPTER I. 

THE QUESTION STATED. 

What is Experience? Sensational psychology 
answers: "A bundle of conscious states . . 44 

The relations among which are mechanical and 
fortuitous " . . 47 

To this answer Kant demurs, on alleged grounds 
of obvious fact . 47 

The main question is, How are the rebutting 
facts to be explained? or, ;; How are synthetic 
judgments a priori possible?" 50 

Subdivision of this question 52 

The inquiry a " transcendental " one ... 53 



CONTENTS. 



XI 



CHAPTER II. 

THE NON-CONTINGENT FORM OF SENSE. 

Sense, in order to be definable, must contain a 

non-contingent element 56 

This element must be at once formal and forma- 
tive . 58 

And is found in space and time 60 

11 Metaphysical Exposition " of space and time . 60 
" Transcendental Exposition " of space and time: 
Pure mathematics possible, only because space 
and time are of the nature indicated in the 
metaphysical exposition. 

Ontological inferences 

Psychological empiricism corrected . 
Sceptical Idealism ostensibly justified 

But not really 

Kant's doctrine of space and time point; 
direction of Spiritualistic Idealism 



the 



64 

68 
70 
70 
72 



CHAPTER III. 

THE UNDERSTANDING AS A NON-CONTINGENT FACULTY 
OF SENSIBLE KNOWLEDGE. 

Sense and Understanding contrasted .... 80 

Function of the Understanding 84 

Fundamental categories or conceptions, of the 
understanding, as a faculty of sensible knowl- 
edge 87 



xii CONTENTS. 

Metaphysical exposition of the categories . . 88 
The categories are deduced and defined with 
reference to their use and meaning in pure 

physical science only 93 

That they have no other use or significance is 
assumed, but not proved 96 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE " TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION " OF THE 
CATEGORIES. 

General purport of the "transcendental deduc- 
tion": Pure physical science possible, only 
because the categories are of the nature indi- 
cated in the preceding chapter .... 99 

Sensible impressions, regarded as the element- 
ary material of knowledge, are given without 
connection among themselves .... 102 

So far as they are, as matter of experimental 
fact, really connected in our knowledge, this 
connection, or " synthesis," is the work of the 
understanding alone 105 

And of the understanding, only in dependence 
on the synthetic unity of self-consciousness . 108 

Sensible consciousness — pure physical science 
or knowledge of " nature " — must be subject 
at least to the universal, synthetic form of 
self-consciousness 113 



CONTENTS. Xlll 

And to the special forms of connection, or syn- 
thesis, denoted by the categories . . .115 

In other words, sensible perception involves 
intellectual conception 116 

Thus the " objective," insensible knowledge, 
depends on. or in its form is determined by, 
the 4i subjective " ; or, we, in knowing phenom- 
ena, prescribe to them, a priori, their laws . 118 

The transcendental deduction, considered as a 
contribution to the science of knowledge, is 
marred by Kant's obstinate persistence in 
treating sensible consciousness, the mechani- 
cal product, as condition, rather than depend- 
ent result, of self-consciousness, the living, 
organic process 120 

In this he resists the logic of his own " discov- 
eries " . . . 130 

CHAPTER V. 

THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. 

Namely, of pure mathematical and physical 
science 136 

The principles are founded on the categories . 137 
The : ' Schematism of the Categories " . . .139 
The principle of all principles is the dependence 

of sensible consciousness on self-consciousness 148 
(1) All sensibly perceived phenomena have mag- 
nitude of extension 149 



XIV CONTENTS. 

(2) And, considered as sensations, vary in inten- 
sity 151 

They must also be conceived (3), under the as- 
pect of persistence in time, as substances . 157 

(4) Under the aspect of determinate succession 
in time, as ;: causes " and " effects," or as sub- 
ject to rule or law of succession . . . .162 

And (5), under the aspect of determinate co- 
existence in time, as subject to rule or law of 
coexistence 171 

Under various, defined conditions they must also 
be regarded as (6) possible, (7) real, or (8) 
necessary 176 

CHAPTER VI. 

THE LIMIT OF SCIENCE. 

Science extends only to phenomena; what 
ground for distinguishing the latter from 
Things-in-themselves, or from Noumena? . 181 
Different Connotation of the two expressions 

" Things-in-themselves " and " Noumena " . 183 
Confusion in Kant's conceptions . . . .190 
Kant's answers to the above question . . . 194 
Theory of intellectual intuition . . . . 196 

The conception of Noumena purely problematic, 
yet necessary 199 

And the doorway to the realm of " rational 
faith " and " practical experience " . . . 200 



CONTEXTS. xv 

The whole movement of the Critique is in the 
direction of the philosophic and spiritualistic 
conception of Xoumena 206 

The conception of Noumena as noting a limit of 
pure physical science 207 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE FUTILITY OF " METAPHYSICS/' 

Recapitulation 209 

"Transcendental Dialectic"' as "Logic of Illu- 
sion" 212 

Reason as the seat of this illusion .... 212 
Transcendental Ideas of Reason . . . .217 
General remarks on Kant's criticism of " meta- 
physics " 217 

Criticism of Rational Psychology . . ... 219 
Criticism of Rational Cosmology .... 226 

The Cosmological Ideas 228 

The Four Antinomies 230 

The world of our knowledge is erroneously as- 
sumed, in the antinomies, to be absolute and 
noumenal, rather than relative and merely 

phenomenal 236 

Critical solution of the antinomies .... 239 
Xo positive conflict between " transcendental 
freedom" and natural law 244 



XVI CONTENTS. 

Rational Theology; its necessary presuppositions 
and true method ........ 250 

The method of dogmatic metaphysics . . . 255 

The Ontological Argument 257 

The Cosmological Argument 258 

The Teleological Argument 260 

" Metaphysics " can neither prove nor disprove 
God's existence 261 



CHAPTER VIII. 

METAPHYSICS AS A SCIENCE. 

The " Discipline of Pure Reason 1 ': the method 
of pure mathematical and physical science 
must be abandoned by metaphysics . . . 264 
" Practical " problems of metaphysics . . . 267 
The History of Philosophy . . . . . .269 

Conclusion 271 



INTRODUCTION. 



THE works that have marked epochs, of one 
kind or another, in the history of philosophy 
are very different in character. Some of them 
are constructive, and lead to positive conclusions; 
others are destructive, and end mainly in negations; 
others, still, are " critical, 1 ' marking periods of 
transition in the history of philosophic intelligence, 
from negative or skeptical to more positive and af- 
firmative convictions. Examples of the first class 
are found in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Leib- 
nitz, Hegel, and others. Hume's " Treatise on Hu- 
man Nature " illustrates conspicuously the second 
class; while of the third, Kant's ;i Critique of Pure 
Reason " furnishes the most noteworthy instance. 

This apparent oscillation of philosophy between 
contradictory extremes of affirmation and negation 
has, as is well known, given abundant occasion to 
its enemies to blaspheme. If, it has been plausibly 
argued, philosophers persistently contradict each 
other, it is safe to infer that none of them have 
demonstrative knowledge of that whereof they af- 
firm. And yet this inference is extremely super- 
ficial, as all know who have thorough comprehen- 
sion of the true nature of philosophy's peculiar prob- 



2 k ant's critique of pure reason. 

lems, and of ihe results which have attended their 
investigation. 

All science involves two elements: knowledge of 
the particular, and knowledge of the universal. A 
particular fact is not scientifically known until it 
has been classified with some other fact or facts. 
This means that it is not an object of scientific 
knowledge until there is discovered something — a 
nature or law — which is common to it and to other 
facts. And that which is thus common to all is the 
so-called " universal." It is the universal quality, 
or mode of existence, or of activity, of the class of 
facts or objects in question. 

Now, it is peculiar to all objects of knowledge 
that, in some form or other, they exist. To all of 
them Being of some kind is ascribed. This is their 
universal predicate. The peculiar object of philo- 
sophic science is the determination of the meaning 
of this predicate. What do we mean when we say 
that an object of knowledge is, that the universe is, 
that man is? What is it to be? What is? What 
is the universal nature of existence? And if there 
are more kinds of being than one, what is that uni- 
versal kind which includes and explains them all? 
Such are the first and cardinal inquiries of philoso- 
phy, which, accordingly, was with perfect accuracy 
defined by Aristotle, more than two thousand years 
ago, as the ''Science of Being as such." 

Now, that the results of such a science, — far from 
being, as is often thoughtlessly supposed, merely 
" speculative," and so unpractical and useless, — are 



INTRODUCTION. 3 

of the highest consequence, both for the universal 
enlightenment of intelligence and for the direction 
of conduct, becomes upon reflection perfectly obvi- 
ous. A science so universal in its range as philoso- 
phy, by its definition, is, must contribute something 
to our comprehension of every object of knowledge; 
and inasmuch as conduct depends on knowledge, it 
cannot be without its powerful influence upon the 
practical direction of human affairs. 

Let us look at the case more concretely. The an- 
swers which, as matter of historic fact, have been 
given to philosophy's central inquiry, are implied 
in such expressions as theoretical Materialism, prac- 
tical Materialism, or Scepticism, or Agnosticism, and 
Spiritualistic Idealism. The theoretic Materialist 
holds that whatever is, is material. Suppose this 
principle established, and it follows at once that, if 
there be forms or spheres of existence which appear to 
be non-material, we must not allow ourselves to be 
misled by this appearance, but must train ourselves 
to look for and to find in them nothing but peculiar 
manifestations or varieties of that which in essence 
and mode of action is material. Thus, if the mate- 
rialistic thesis or principle be true, the knowledge 
of it serves to prevent or demolish contrary preju- 
dices and to promote universal intelligence. More- 
over, it has immediate bearings upon life. When 
consistently developed, it teaches us to look upon 
ourselves as mechanically determined, and hence 
irresponsible, in all our actions, and to correct ac- 
cordingly those notions of human relations — of man 



4 kant's critique OF PURE REASON". 

and man, in Society; of man and the universe, in Art, 
and of man and God, in Religion, — which, being ap- 
parently founded in human experience, are currently 
adopted among men. The like, in substance, is 
taught by practical Materialism, or Agnosticism, 

" Nur mit ein bischen andern Worten" 
On the other hand, the Spiritualistic Idealist holds 
that the universal nature of Being is spiritual; that 
the essence of all absolute reality is not materialistic 
and dead, but idealistic and living: that the uni- 
verse is an organism of Mind, of activities whose 
ultimate origin is in Will, of purposes whose expla- 
nation is Intelligence, of laws and of orders whose 
reason is the Good. This is in substance the doc- 
trine, in the maintenance of which all of the philoso- 
phers of the first, or constructive, class above men- 
tioned agree. It is the catholic doctrine of philosophy. 
It represents the positive results of scientific inquiry 
respecting the problems peculiar to philosophy. It 
is true to all the sides of human experience, and so 
is capable of comprehending and being just to what- 
ever of relative truth may be contained in theoreti- 
cal Materialism or in Agnosticism. Nay, more, in the 
relative and hence only partial truth of Materialism 
and Agnosticism, Spiritualistic Idealism sees its own 
larger lineaments prefigured and implied, and so 
sees in the whole history of philosophy nothing but 
consentient witness to its own truth. How this can 
be, will, it is hoped, presently be made more definitely 
to appear. It suffices here only to remark that the 
positive fruit of the idealistic doctrine, in contribut- 



INTRODUCTION". 5 

ing to the intelligent comprehension of all expe- 
rience and the guidance of life, is (surely!) not less 
conspicuous, and, in its range, universal, than that of 
Materialism. Whatever be true, then, in philosophy, 
its importance can be denied only by an intelligence 
that is absolutely blinded by prejudice or by uncul- 
ture. That something is thus true, or that the car- 
dinal question of philosophy must receive, and is 
capable of receiving, some sort of an intelligent 
answer, is implied in the fact that all men, by their 
conduct, virtually adopt one philosophy or another. 
Practically they give to its fundamental query either 
a materialistic or an idealistic answer; and this — 
since all men are or would be rational — is tanta- 
mount to a mute assertion that the answer in 
question can be justified before the forum of intelli- 
gence. 

Philosophy is the Science of Being. But Being, 
or the Universe of Reality, is given only in the realm 
of experience. The Science of Being can therefore 
be studied only through study of the content of ex- 
perience. And thus it is studied. Philosophy does 
not transcend, nor pretend to transcend, the range 
of experience. And if ;; philosophies " have differed 
in their ostensible results, this has been only because 
their respective advocates have found, or thought 
they found, some more, others less, contained in ex- 
perience. 

But what is experience? It is only by a figure 
that experience can be likened to a vessel, which 
" contains" objects or the knowledge of objects. At 



6 kant's critique of pure reason. 

all events, the relation between experience and its 
so-called contents is not purely mechanical and acci- 
dental, so that the nature of the latter may be 
studied apart from the former. No, the " study of 
the content of experience," considered absolutely, 
cannot be carried on without studying experience 
itself. Now, experience is nothing other than our 
real or implicit knowledge, or our real or implicit 
consciousness. It results, therefore, that the Science 
of Being and the Science of Knowledge are organic- 
ally one and inseparable. The study of the one can 
be prosecuted only through, in, and along with, the 
study of the other. The recognition of this fact is 
of capital importance for him who would understand 
the peculiar nature of philosophy's problems, and 
comprehend the historic methods and results of 
philosophic inquiry. 

The interdependence of these two, ideally, but 
not really, distinguishable sciences is illustrated in 
the whole history of philosophy, and contains the 
key to the explanation of the apparently conflicting 
results of philosophic investigation. The germs of 
the science of knowledge lay scattered — in no great 
profusion, it is true — in the pre-Socratic "philoso- 
phy" of Greece. Such as they were, they furnished 
the impulse for that intellectual movement which 
resulted in the classic philosophy of Greece, — the 
philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. Plato's " Theory 
of Ideas " is at once science of Knowledge and, 
through and in it, of Being. The philosophy of 
Aristotle has its real strength in his science of 



INTRODUCTION. i 

Knowledge. The great merit of the modern Ger- 
man movement in philosophy, from Kant to Hegel, 
lay in the new development which it gave to the 
same science. It was through this science that the 
final leaders in this movement rehabilitated the sci- 
ence of Being. It w T as through it that, in the lan- 
guage of a recent German writer, these men rescued 
the modern mind from the barren heath of purely 
arbitrary reflection and subjective uncertainty, and 
brought it back to the green pasture of objective 
reality, restoring us to rich and concrete knowledge 
of ourselves and of the world. And the impulse to 
the modern movement was the same in kind with 
that which brought forth the ancient one. It con- 
sisted in the intense cultivation, on the part of ear- 
lier "philosophers" (Locke, etc.), of certain rootlets, 
or first beginnings, of the science of Knowledge, with 
results which were so far from corresponding with 
human knowledge, or experience, in its actual organic 
wholeness that they contained a direct challenge to 
farther and more complete inquiry. Outside of the 
two historic movements of philosophic inquiry which 
culminated with Aristotle and Hegel, it can hardly 
be said that the science of Knowledge, organically 
one with, and absolutely inseparable from, the science 
of Being, or from philosophy proper, has ever been 
investigated in such way as to take complete account 
of all the elements of the problem as presented in 
conscious experience. It is certainly true to say 
that, independently of these two movements and of 
their influence, the problem in question has never 



8 kakt's critique OF PURE REASON". 

been thus investigated. And it is also true that the 
result of the modern investigation was confirmatory 
of the result of the ancient one, but enriched with 
fuller detail and more copious demonstration. 

The science of knowledge is the key to the science 
of Being, and the different conceptions respecting the 
nature of Being, or of absolute Reality, which have 
been propounded in the guise of philosophy, all re- 
sult from different conceptions respecting the nature 
of knowledge. The different views which have been 
held respecting the nature of knowledge are simply 
so many views respecting the nature, conditions and 
range of experience. Further, these differences of 
view are — if the expression may be allowed — rather 
differences of more and less, than of contradiction. 
Knowledge is a complex process, and the different 
views held concerning it result from the circum- 
stance that some look only at one or two sides of the 
process, while others — the true philosophers — look at 
all sides. The former, of course, see in knowledge or 
experience less, the latter more. Those who see the 
more see also and recognize the less. There is here 
no contradiction. Apparent contradiction arises 
only when those who see only the less declare that 
the less is all, and so deny the more. Such contra- 
diction, however, is purely dogmatic, and does not 
arise from the nature of the case itself which is 
under examination. In other words, the positive, 
scientific results of inquiry are not contradictory, but 
complementary. 

Of the whole nature of knowledge, or conscious 



INTRODUCTION. 9 

experience, the theoretical materialist sees least, and 
it is he whose inquiries into the subject are most 
superficial. He observes, in common with all men, 
that knowledge, in one of its characteristic aspects, 
is an affair of sensation; it is "conveyed to us in 
through the senses." This he adopts as the whole 
account of knowledge. The senses he looks upon as 
reporters — and the only reporters — of that which we 
know, and consequently of that which we must be- 
lieve to be. But the senses report a ; ' material uni- 
verse." Consequently, a material universe, and 
nothing else, exists. Whatever truly is consists of 
atoms of material substance, about whose origin or 
end no rational inquiry can be raised. 

Theoretical or absolute materialism is purely dog- 
matic. It has no scientific standing whatever. It 
is refuted by its own premises. Accordingly, when- 
ever in the history of philosophic inquiry it has 
reared its head, this has been only for a brief period. 
The witness of scientific inquiry has speedily demol- 
ished it. 

Materialism says, All knowledge is sensible knowl- 
edge, and consequently all existence is purely sensi- 
ble, i.e. material. It is indeed by such reasoning 
that materialism must justify itself, if justification 
be possible. It is on such a theory of knowledge as is 
enunciated in the foregoing premise, that the theory 
of Being affirmed in the conclusion must be founded, 
if foundation it is to have. But the peculiarity and 
defect of materialism is, that it substitutes dogmatic 
assertion for scientific inquiry into the meaning of 



10 kant's critique of pure REASOK. 

its own premises. There have been plenty of men, 
in ancient and modern times, who have adopted the 
materialistic premise, and who, in addition, have in- 
quired into its meaning. They have examined the 
nature and conditions of sensible knowledge as such, 
and have set up a science — true enough as far as it 
goes --of such knowledge. And the uniform result 
of their investigations has been, not that because 
(as assumed) all knowledge is sensible knowledge, 
therefore all existence is material, but that, in the 
words of Mr. Herbert Spencer, " our own and all 
other existence is a mystery absolutely and forever 
beyond our comprehension. '' The inference of theo- 
retical materialism was hasty, superficial, illogical: 
that of agnosticism is founded on scientific inquiry, 
and is true. And if all human knowledge were 
specifically and exclusively sensible — in the sense 
in which this term is technically employed and 
will presently be explained — agnosticism would be 
the last word of philosophy. But this is the same as 
to say that philosophy would not, in any positive 
sense, exist. For philosophy is the science of Being; 
but agnosticism consists in nothing but a persuasion 
that no such science is possible. 

Now, the question between those who limit all 
knowledge to sense and those who recognize for it 
a more comprehensive nature is a question of ex- 
perimental fact, to be settled, not by mere assertion, 
but by scientific examination of the facts themselves. 
It is in this way that the true philosophers have 
sought to settle it. Knowledge is a conscious pro- 



INTRODUCTION. 11 

cess. The question is, What is the nature and true 
description of this process? and what are the terms 
or factors involved in the process? 

The process of knowledge most obviously involves 
the distinction of two factors, termed subject and 
object. It is in these factors that Being inheres. 
The process into which they enter is, in its results, 
knowledge (knowing), consciousness, experience. 
What is the relation between the. factors as in- 
volved in this process? This may be termed the 
fundamental question, or problem, of the science of 
Knowledge. Upon the answer given to this ques- 
tion depends the answer which must follow the 
further inquiry, What is the nature of the factors 
themselves? Are they knowable, and, if so, as what 
are they known to be? Or, otherwise expressed, Is 
a science of Being achievable by man, and, if so, 
what does it teach? 

The sensationalist, looking at knowledge in its 
sensible aspect, finds that the relation between sub- 
ject and object is here, apparently, a purely me- 
chanical one: and, in truth, this appearance is the 
essential characteristic of sensible knowledge, qua 
sensible. The technical meaning, above alluded to, 
of the phrase ''specifically sensible knowledge" is 
precisely this, to wit, Knowledge resulting from, or 
at all events depending on. a purely mechanical 
process. The sensationalist, dogmatically assuming 
from the start that all knowledge is sensible, and 
only sensible, maintains that the only relation sub- 
sisting between subject and object is a mechanical 



12 KANT'S critique of pure reason. 

one; or, vice versa, dogmatically maintaining that no 
other than a mechanical relation exists, or can exist, 
between subject and object, thence concludes that all 
knowledge is necessarily of a purely sensible nature. 
A "mechanical relation" — what does this imply? 
It implies that the terms of the relation — in this 
case the subject and object of consciousness — are 
not only numerically different, but are also per se 
wholly independent of and separate from each other. 
A mechanical relation is a purely external and acci- 
dental relation. It consists in mere coexistence, or, 
at most, in superficial contact. It is such a relation, 
only, which the sensationalist conceives as existing 
between subject and object in knowledge. The re- 
lation obviously presupposes a materialistic concep- 
tion of the probable absolute nature of subject and 
object. There, without, is an aggregate of varied 
objects; here, within, is another object, which plays 
the role of subject, having originally no determi- 
nable nature, but being rather " like a piece of white 
paper on which nothing has been written." And 
now the objects begin to play upon the subject in 
the only way which is possible for them, namely, in 
the way of contact or impression. And then, as if 
by magic, the impression becomes illuminated with 
the light of consciousness. By a wonderful trans- 
figuration it becomes an element of knowledge, part 
and parcel of our conscious experience. But where 
in this result are the factors which produced it? 
They are not contained in the product, but are left 
beliind or without it. By virtue of the very nature 



INTRODUCTION. 13 

of the terms in which they were conceived, and of 
the relation posited as existing between them, it is 
impossible that this should be otherwise. Material- 
istically conceived, and incapable of entering into any 
other than a purely mechanical relation, neither of 
them can enter into the other, nor into a tertium 
quid, termed consciousness or knowledge. They can 
at most only be imagined as coming into contact 
with each other, or, so to speak, with consciousness; 
they cannot become a part of consciousness itself. 

What have we, then, as the result of this theory? 
We have, not a scientific explanation or comprehen- 
sion of conscious knowledge, but an act of thauma- 
turgy. We have, on the one side, contact of object 
and subject, or, if you please, communication of mo- 
tion from the environment of a nervous organism to 
the organism itself; on the other, something toto coelo 
different, namely, conscious states. How the former 
can be transformed into or result in the latter, it is 
forever impossible to see. The two terms, mechan- 
ical contact, or motion, and consciousness, are abso- 
lutely incommensurable. And so it is no wonder 
that the sensationalists themselves unanimously con- 
fess the case to be involved in a baffling mystery, 
thus virtually admitting the failure of their own 
theory as ostensibly a complete science of knowledge. 
And how about object and subject? These were as- 
sumed as factors of consciousness, and consequently 
as something lying within consciousness, or as real 
terms, and hence objects, of knowledge. But in the 
result they have disappeared. They remain without 



1-4 kant's critique of pure reason. 

the pale of consciousness, and hence of knowledge. 
They are unknowable. There remains nothing but 
a series of conscious states, each of which, while one 
and indivisible, is yet — by another miracle! — not 
one, but two, being at once subject and object, or 
conscious (as subject) of itself (as object). Thus the 
purely sensational theory of knowledge explains (?) 
knowledge, or consciousness, by explaining away, as 
unknowable, its real factors, and then making con- 
sciousness itself (conceived as a series of passive 
states) do duty in place of those factors, at once as 
its own subject and object. 

The result of this theory is that which in the 
history of philosophy is called Subjective Idealism, 
Scepticism, or Sceptical Idealism, or Agnosticism. 
According to it, knowledge, strictly speaking, is 
confined to the mysterious consciousness which each 
individual has of his own inward states. An object- 
ive world without, as true object of knowledge, and 
a real mind within, as subject of knowledge, — these 
are not known. If existent, they " lie forever be- 
yond our comprehension. " Still, along with this 
theory, and in spite of its negative results, its up- 
holders always maintain the ineradicable " belief " 
that world and mind — especially the former, — the 
latter seems to be considered of less account, — in- 
deed exist. But if they exist, they must, it is held, 
exist behind consciousness, beyond experience, out 
of the reach of sense. Now, as the sphere of sense 
is called the sphere of things physical, world and 
mind must exist beyond or behind what is physical. 



INTRODUCTION. 15 

In other words, they are metaphysical entities. Now, 
the question arises with the sensationalist, how he 
shall justify his confessed or practical belief in these 
entities. The belief is confessedly opposed to the 
results of his theory, and so strictly " unscientific.'* 
Still, as it cannot be got rid of, it must somehow be 
made at least to seem rational. And thus the need 
of a new "science 1, is made to appear — a science 
called ;: metaphysics," whose i; great problem " is 
to prove the 4 ' existence " of something which lies 
wholly without the range of experience, as " scien- 
tifically " defined, namely, the ,; existence of the exter- 
nal world." Observe, now, that this problem is an 
artificial one, created by and resulting only from 
the negative results of a highly artificial and incom- 
plete theory of knowledge. For a broader and com- 
plete science of knowledge, or of conscious experi- 
ence, this problem does not exist. What is called 
the "external world'' already exists and is given in 
man's (not merely sensible) experience, and the prob- 
lem of philosophy, or of the Science of Being, in this 
regard is not to "prove" its existence, but to com- 
prehend it as it exists. The " metaphysical " prob- 
lem, which sensationalism thus creates for itself, is 
of course really insoluble on the basis of the sensa- 
tional theory of knowledge. And so the ;; metaphys- 
ics.'' which seeks to solve the problem, can really only 
consist in covering it up with a cloud of meaning- 
less words and hair-splitting, but wholly nugatory, 
distinctions. This illustrates perfectly what has to 
the greatest extent been understood in modern times, 



16 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

and most of all in British climes, by " metaphysics." 
The number of its problems is increased by the " In- 
tuitionist " of the historic type, who asserts his pos- 
session of rational intuitions, compelling him to be- 
lieve in the existence of God, the soul, absolute moral 
distinctions, etc., as well as of the external world. 
All of these beliefs are indeed highly rational, and 
nothing is to be said per se against the assertion of 
the corresponding intuitions. But the Intuition- 
ist's conception of the nature of the fundamental 
relation between the factors of consciousness is iden- 
tical with the sensationalist's conception. Hence, 
for him, God, the soul, etc., are what the external 
world is for the sensationalist, namely, something 
lying beyond " experience," metaphysical quiddities, 
whose metempirical reality must, if possible, be 
" proven," — not simply comprehended as it is given 
in experience. Such a conception of metaphy- 
sics, as the foregoing, philosophy wholly repudi- 
ates. The great philosophers have never had any- 
thing to do with it, except, possibly, to point out its 
absolute absurdity. It is this conception which, as 
we shall see, Kant adopts, but mercilessly riddles 
and demolishes, thereby, in so far, preparing the 
way for the new life of positive philosophy in the 
works of his successors. 

Theoretical Materialism, as we have seen, is over- 
thrown by the very science to which it appeals for 
support — the science of sensible knowledge. If 
matter possesses absolute substantial existence, as a 
form of real being sui generis, it can only be known 



INTRODUCTION". 17 

through sense. But the analysis of sense — the 
nee of sensible knowledge — shows that through 
sense matter can neither be known to exist nor not 
to exist. The absolute assertion of its existence, — 
and still more, the unqualified assertion that all ex- 
istence is material, — is therefore pure dogmatism. 
What survives the destruction of theoretical mate- 
rialism is, then, as we have further seen, Agnosti- 
cism, which we have once above designated "prac- 
tical Materialism/ 1 The justification of the designa- 
tion will be at once obvious. Agnosticism — the 
science of the unknowableness of Being — rests on 
the purely sensational science of knowledge. It 
assumes this to be the whole science of knowledge. 
This science rests on certain presuppositions, namely. 
that the relation between the terms of knowledge, 
subject and object, is mechanical, and only mechan- 
ical, and that, consequently, the terms themselves 
must, at all events, and can only be materialistically 
conceived, — which lead, it is true, only to negative 
and apparently self- destructive conclusions. But 
since it is arbitrarily assumed that no other presup- 
positions are admissible or agreeable to experimental 
fact, since the categories of matter and mechanism, 
notwithstanding the sensationalists 1 demonstration 
of their ontological " inscrutableness,' 1 are dogmatic- 
ally declared to be the only categories admissible in 
scientific thought, it follows that either science must 
be renounced, or it must continue to speak the lan- 
guage of Materialism, and of Materialism alone. If 
matter be unknowable, yet phenomena, which may 
2 



18 KANT'S CBITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

be termed phenomena of matter, are known, being 
indeed strictly identical, in the last analysis, with 
those states of sensible consciousness which are 
declared to constitute the whole sum and sub- 
stance — the whole subject and object — of all our 
real knowledge. And so the Agnostic makes all 
our science or knowledge to be in the last resort 
conversant only with so-called phenomena of the 
" redistribution of matter and motion. " Hence he 
is to be termed a practical Materialist. 

So, then, the purely sensational theory of knowl- 
edge ends by making a science of Being impossible, 
while practically it compels us to adopt the attitude 
of mechanistic materialism. This result cannot 
rationally be resisted — it must the rather be unhesi- 
tatingly adopted, — if the theory in question corre- 
sponds to all the facts involved in the process of 
conscious experience. That it corresponds to some 
of the facts, and is thus relatively true, is not to be 
doubted. There is such a thing as sensible knowl- 
edge, or a sensible aspect of knowledge, and the 
sensational analysis is correct which discovers in 
such knowledge and in all its objects the presence of 
mechanical relations. And so, too, there exists for 
man a realm of existence, or of phenomena of exist- 
ence, which may most conveniently be termed mate- 
rial. The only questions are. Is all knowledge 
purely sensible, or, is the sensible, i.e. the mechan- 
ical, aspect of knowledge its only aspect? And 
then, what is the real nature, or what the true 
explanation, of the realm of apparent existence 



INTRODUCTION". 19 

termed material? This last question, it will be 
noted, cannot, in view of what has above been 
shown, be answered, except on condition that we 
really find in knowledge something more than sense, 
as above explained. This is one of the oddities of 
the history of speculation, namely, that philosophic 
materialism, with its mechanico-sensible theory of 
knowledge, being always suicidal, not able to de- 
fend itself, turning all its ontological science into 
nescience, and changing the real material universe, 
which it set out to magnify and defend, into a 
spectre, has at last to turn for protection, or for its 
relative justification, to another doctrine, apparently 
the precise opposite of itself. It is Spiritualistic 
Idealism alone which, findincr in knowledge some- 
thing more than mechanical sense, rescues the mate- 
rial universe for us as a scene of objective and 
knowable, though dependent, reality. The real, ob- 
jective truth of " Materialism.'' or the true defense 
of " matter. 1 ' is found, not in the doctrine which 
calls itself ; * Materialism." but in Idealism. 

The first and main question, then, is a question of 
fact. Is it experimentally true that the sole rela- 
tion between subject and object in knowledge is a 
mechanical one; and. if not, what other relation do 
the facts disclose? What are the facts? The facts 
are that subject and object are distinguished within 
consciousness, or knowledge, and not simply outside 
of it. This means that, while numerically different, 
they are. in some real and effective sense, one. And 
this, again, means — ;i discloses, " demonstrates, shows 



20 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

— that the relation between them is not simply 
mechanical. Things which are only mechanically 
different can in no real sense be one. They can at 
most be one only in the sense in which we say that 
stones thrown together form one heap, or aggregate, 
of stones: But this unity, the unity of mere aggre- 
gation, is not of the kind which is revealed in 
conscious knowledge. Subject and object are not 
indifferent to each other. It is not pure matter of 
accident whether they come together or not. The 
rather, they are inseparable from each other. Each 
implies and is most intimately one with the other. 
The object becomes object only as it becomes a part 
of the subject; — all consciousness is self- conscious- 
ness. On the other hand, the subject becomes 
subject only as it merges itself in its object ; — all 
consciousness is objective consciousness. These facts 
of conscious experience cannot, without contradic- 
tion, be stated in terms of mere mechanism, or con- 
ceived with the aid of its categories alone. And 
yet they are patent and ever-present facts of living 
experience. And the work of a truly objective 
science of knowledge is not to insist that the facts 
shall square with the requirements of a preconceived 
and extremely narrow theory, on pain, if they resist, 
of being declared absolutely mysterious, and so no 
further object of science, but to let them speak for 
themselves; or, in other words, to look the facts 
squarely in the face and simply learn from them 
what relation they disclose as subsisting between the 
subject and object in knowledge, and then, further, 



INTRODUCTION. 21 

what ontological nature of subject and object 
(whether materialistic or spiritualistic) this rela- 
tion itself discloses. It is only in this way that the 
true science of knowledge, and. in and through it, of 
being, can be attained. It is. as we have above inti- 
mated, by their pursuit of this way, that the two 
great movements of philosophic inquiry, which 
reached their culminating points with Aristotle and 
Hegel, achieved their durable, positive and com- 
manding results. The series of c; German Philo- 
sophical Classics/' in which the present volume is 
the first one to appear, will have it for their joint 
task to show, with some detail, by what steps, and 
with what results, the authors, whose work is to be 
exhibited, pushed on in this way, and so succeeded 
in answering the question and interpreting the 
facts which we have before us. And right here a 
digression may be allowed, to make place for the re- 
mark, that the "steps" which Kant, Fichte, Schel- 
ling and Hegel took, mark a progress. Kant took 
the first step away from, or in advance of, the sen- 
sational theory of knowledge, but only the first. 
Fichte took another, and Schelling still another, the 
final one being accomplished by Hegel. The last 
step reached a goal to which the first one logically 
pointed. In this sense it is perfectly true to say 
that Hegel is the true interpreter of Kant, and that 
the cry now prevalent in philosophical circles, 
" back to Kant,'' means, and can only mean, when 
logically interpreted, ;i back also to Kant's suc- 
cessors. ''' Let it further be expressly remarked, in 



22 KANTS CRITIQUE OF PUBE REASON. 

this place, that because one recognizes and insists 
upon what a given philosopher, or set of philoso- 
phers, has positively achieved, it does not therefore 
follow that one must have a partisan's blindness to 
all the possible defects or incompletenesses of the 
achievement, or to the possibly erroneous inferences 
which the philosophers themselves, or their admirers, 
may have drawn from their achievement. The 
authors engaged upon this series of " Classics " 
swear by no name. They simply see in the works, 
which they undertake to expound, a notable contri- 
bution to the science of knowledge and of being. 
The value of this contribution is not determined by 
the names of its authors, but by the measure of its 
correspondence with ever-present facts of life and 
experience, and of its agreement with the positive 
results of all really scientific — comprehensive, cath- 
olic, not partial or prejudiced — inquiry into the 
nature of these facts in all time. 

The relation between subject and object is not 
essentially mechanical, and hence subject and object 
are not to be materialistically conceived. If all con- 
sciousness is at once self-consciousness and also 
objective consciousness, so that subject and object, 
while experimentally presented as different, are also 
experimentally presented as in some real and effect- 
ive sense one, the fundamental relation between 
subject and object must be, not dead and inert, but 
living and forceful; not material, but ideal, or, 
rather, spiritual. It is a relation which can only 
be called organic, or the relation of particular to 



INTRODUCTION. 23 

particular through the organic identity of both in 
the universal. This is by no means a purely sensi- 
ble or mechanical relation, though it is not exclusive 
of such relation, rightly understood. Nor is it an 
unintelligible one. On the contrary, it is the most 
intelligible of all relations, being present wherever 
there i* life. For illustration of it we refer the 
reader to the last part of Chapter IV below. In 
view of the fact that the relation is of the kind 
above described, it follows that its terms, subject and 
object, cannot simply be space-occupying atoms. 
They are not merely sensible entities, or ,; sub- 
stances," mechanically separated from each other. 
They reveal themselves primarily as activities. 
They actively unite in one, and at the same time 
keep themselves differentiated, the one from the 
other. More especially they reveal themselves as 
forces of the only kind which man has ever been 
able to conceive without contradiction, namely, as 
spiritual forces, self-illuminated by intelligence and 
rooted in will. It follows, then, that being is not 
simply inertly existing in space: no such existence, 
considered absolutely, is known or knowable. Being 
is Doing, and Doing is, in the first and last resort, 
the operation of Spirit. But the activity of Spirit 
is Life, and so Life in some sense is coextensive with 
the realm of Reality. It is in the contemplation 
of such results of inquiry as these, that Plato terms~ 
the Absolute the Good; Aristotle, pure Energy, 
which is the same as Mind (and he adds. " Energy of 
Mind is Life "); St. John. Love: Hegel, Spirit; and 



24 kant's critique of pure reasof. 

all of these designations, rightly interpreted, express 
the same truth of absolute fact or of absolute expe- 
rience. 

The full truth of these results of philosophic in- 
quiry, thus fragmentarily stated, is appreciated in 
all its significance only as the result of an appro- 
priate scientific discipline of intelligence ; or, in 
other words, of persevering, objective study of facts. 
The same thing is, in its measure, true as regards 
the results of any science. And yet they lie dem- 
onstrated in the history of philosophy, or of scien- 
tific inquiry into the nature and real content of 
our conscious experience, or knowledge. The fur- 
ther proof of their truth is found in their agree- 
ment with man's whole and undivided experience,, 
and in the circumstance, demonstrated by the whole 
history of thought, that, except on worthless grounds 
of purely dogmatic, wilful assertion, no other reso- 
lute philosophy or Science of Being has been, or 
can ever be, maintained. To attend to the latter 
point first. The only doctrine other than the one 
above sketched, which has a scientific character and 
somewhat resembles a philosoph} r , or a Science of 
Being, is Practical Materialism, — otherwise termed, 
nowadays, Agnosticism. We have seen that this 
doctrine is nevertheless, as its new name implies, 
not philosophy, but the denial of the possibility of 
philosophy. But this is only the negative and 
purely dogmatic part of Agnosticism. The positive 
substance of Agnosticism is nothing other than 
Physical Science. It adopts the just and admitted 



INTRODUCTION. 25 

principles, methods and limitations of physical sci- 
ence, and consists then, on its positive side, in seeking 
to show what are, or must be, the highest generaliza- 
tions or results of such science, and to demonstrate 
their truth. Xow, the subject-matter of physical 
science is coextensive with the sphere of sensible 
existence, qua sensible. The general nature, or 
theory, therefore, of physical science, considered as 
pure science or knowledge, is determined by or results 
from the science of sensible knowledge, qua sensible. 
In agreement, accordingly, with the results of this 
latter science, we find that physical science, in its 
highest generalizations and ideals, remains ever 
within the category of pure mechanism, and that it 
limits the objects of its knowledge — the subject- 
matter of its inquiry — to conscious, sensible phe- 
nomena. It knows no absolute substance or entity, 
whether material or otherwise, and it knows no 
force. It only knows sensibly conscious phenome- 
na of figured space and motion. Xow, it were, 
of course, ludicrous to say that this nature and these 
limitations of physical science detract in the least 
from the positively scientific and fruitful character 
of such science. And so far as Agnosticism simply 
makes common cause with physical science and seeks 
to promote its development, it is itself positively 
scientific. But when it says that physical science 
is all science, sensible knowledge all knowledge, it 
becomes dogmatic. It denies, as it must then do, 
the possibility of philosophy, and. in doing so on 
the ground which it alleges, it virtually declares that 



26 K ant's critique of pure reason. 

within the field of real, positive philosophy Spirit- 
ualistic Idealism has no rival. If it have such rival, 
it must find it in physical science. But physical 
science here declares its impotence. Its t; realism," 
the realism of sense, or of sensible knowledge as 
such, turns to the most intensely subjective ;i ideal- 
ism " — an ;i idealism " falsely so called, that limits 
all knowledge to subjective sensible appearance, and 
knows nothing of the true, objective Ideal or Spirit- 
ual, which is the true and ever-present Real, and the 
living seat of Efficiency, of Power, of Being. But 
such i: idealism " falls far short of the realism of 
experience. Even the popular consciousness of man- 
kind — nay, the very consciousness of the Agnostic 
himself (who postulates an " inscrutable force " 
underlying the universe) sees in the world some- 
thing more than conscious phenomena of configura- 
tion and motion. And now to this side of experi- 
ence, philosophy, or Spiritualistic Idealism, shows 
itself true. Philosophy has, with reference to phy- 
sical science, nothing to do but to acknowledge and 
confirm the justness of her results, as far as they go. 
But she supplements them by showing what they 
mean. She shows that sensible phenomena point 
to and manifest a reality which is within, and not 
without, experience. The physical or so-called ma- 
erial universe is real, — real not only in the ab- 
stract and ontologically shadowy sense in which 
physical science, or the ' ; philosophy " reared in its 
name, depicts it, but in a concreter and more vital 
sense. It is real, not simply as the subjective con- 



INTRODUCTION. 27 

scious product of assumed forces, but as the objec- 
tive scene of the action of real forces, which, being 
true forces, are of spiritual origin, subject to laws 
of perfect purpose, and consequently of invariable 
order, and which work together for the production, 
not simply of " one far-off divine event," but of 
myriads of present and ever-continuing divine 
events. The whole truth, such as it is, of material- 
ism is not only recognized by philosophy ; it is also 
explained, and that, too, in agreement with the 
essential nature of human experience. 

But the characteristic side of human experience 
is not materialistic, mechanical, sensible. Man has 
a life, and this his characteristic life, in religion, 
art, society, and even in communion with and mas- 
tery of nature herself. In all these relations his 
experience confirms and is explicable only by that 
organic-spiritual theory of experience which results 
from the completed science of knowledge, and which 
philosophy adopts. In all of them the individual, 
while retaining all his individuality, is yet organic- 
ally one with a larger life, which imparts to his own 
individual life its true substance, giving it a fixed 
and inspiring purpose, and a character founded in 
the universal, the abiding, the true. Such facts as 
these, mechanism, which knows no organic unity, 
no true life, no spirit, is unable to explain. It can 
analyze, on their phenomenal or sensible side, the 
factors involved in the relations noted, and trace 
their outward mechanical history, — and this is well: 
this is valuable and, for complete knowledge, neces- 



28 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

sary. But exclusive mechanism misses the one thing 
which above all others it is needful to recognize, — the 
" spiritual bond," the common, cooperant, efficient 
life, the effective purpose, the synthetic, inspiring 
power. And yet this one thing is here and with us, 
ever present in conscious experience. And it loses 
its mystery as an object of knowledge or comprehen- 
sion just so soon as we recognize that the funda- 
mental relation in all conscious experience is a 
relation of members which are in organic unity, 
which exist only as terms of a living process, in and 
through each other, or in and through a universal, a 
power and life of spirit, which (as God) indeed 
transcends them both, but still does not exclude 
them; the rather, in agreement with its essential 
nature as Love, includes them in its own embrace, 
and so gives light and being to everything that 
" cometh into the world." 

Such, in general and all too vague outline, is the 
only ontology known to philosophy. It is the only 
ontology which has in it positive, nay, universal and 
all-comprehensive substance, being founded on the 
whole of experience and mutilating or cutting off no 
member thereof. It alone makes the universe to be, 
for intelligence, not merely a universe of brute fact, 
(and so in truth not a universe for intelligence!) 
but of overflowing meaning and of absolute, because 
spiritual, and so effective and self-illuminating, real- 
ity. And of such order is the truth demonstrated 
in the classic philosophy of Greece, and in German 
philosophy from Leibnitz and Kant to Hegel. 



INTRODUCTION". 29 

The first step in the modern. German demonstra- 
tion was taken by Immanuel Kant, who, born of 
humble parents (the father was of Scottish origin) 
in the city of Konigsberg, in the year 1724, died 
there in the year 1804. 

Modern philosophy, before Kant's time, had, as a 
whole, been effectually stunted in its growth. This 
in consequence of two circumstances: first, that as 
a general rule, the so-called founders of modern 
philosophy made it a principle of their procedure 
wholly to ;t break off from the past/ 1 i.e. haughtily 
to ignore ancient philosophy, rather than to com- 
prehend it and learn the true lesson of its merits as 
well as of its deficiencies; and secondly, that mod- 
ern philosophy took its rise at a time when the 
mathematical and physical sciences, which are spe- 
cifically concerned only with the facts or condition- 
ing forms and relations of sensible existence, were 
being, or were beginning to be, cultivated with 
unusual zeal and success. The contagion of the 
influence and example of these sciences inspired the 
disposition, on the part of philosophy, to imitate 
their method and adopt their theoretical presupposi- 
tions. So it came about that in modern philosophy, 
down to the time of Kant, the category of mechan- 
ism reigned well-nigh supreme. But the category 
of mechanism, as we have seen, corresponds to and 
expresses the characteristically sensible side or aspect 
of conscious experience, and its exclusive adoption 
implies the adoption of a purely mechanical theory 
of the process of knowledge and an essentially mate' 



30 KAXrS CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

rialistic conception of the terms involved in this 
process. 

All this is signally illustrated in the general 
complexion and results of the philosophy of Des- 
cartes and Spinoza, notwithstanding the garb of 
dogmatic idealism with which their doctrine is more 
or less completely invested. We note here only one 
point. Philosophy, as Science of Being, seeks, of 
course, an adequate conception of the nature of 
being, as such, and an adequate expression for the 
conception. The expression naturally follows and 
conforms to the conception. Now, the Cartesian and 
Spinozistic synonym for absolute Being is Substance. 
The term substance suggests only mechanical and 
sensible relations. One may term the Absolute, or 
Absolute Being, 4i God," with every breath, as Spi- 
noza does. But as long as the Absolute is conceived 
ana defined only as a " substance," the word " God " 
will be but an empty name. The relations expressed 
by the term substance are abstract, mathematical, 
dead. They are relative to the concrete, living, 
spiritual, from which they are abstracted. God is a 
living Spirit, or he is nothing. The Absolute is 
spiritual, or else, as the history of philosophy shows, 
unknowable. To term and conceive it simply as 
substance, is really to lose sight of it, and to treat 
as absolute that which is in fact only relative, de- 
pendent, phenomenal. A " philosophy " which does 
this is dogmatic — a description commonly given in 
the history of philosophy to the doctrine of Des- 
cartes and Spinoza. Leibnitz, the one man who, 



INTRODUCTION. 31 

thoroughly conversant with the mathematical and 
physical science of his time, and also with ancient 
as well as modern philosophy, towered above all 
others of the two centuries between which his life 
was divided, in the matter of positive philosophic in- 
sight, continued, while correcting Deseartes's and 
Spinoza's error of conception, to emplo/ for the 
Absolute the term which they had used. He called 
it substance, but then declared, " Substance is 
Action/' All absolute existence, he saw and held, 
is an energy of intelligence. The conception was 
correct, but the above terms in which it was ex- 
pressed, involved, when taken literally, a patent, 
paradox. And we may say that, corresponding to 
this defect in expression, the grand defect in Leib- 
nitz's whole doctrine arises from the presence in it 
of a mechanistic element, not reduced into harmony 
with the main spiritualistic tendency. 

Even more signally, though in a very different 
fashion, is our thesis respecting the prevailing char- 
acter of philosophy before Kant's time illustrated in 
the history of British inquiry. From the time of 
Francis Bacon down almost to this day. the leading 
and dominant current of British speculation has run 
in the channel of sensational empiricism. It has 
been a self styled "experimental philosophy.'* a phi- 
losophy founded in experience, as. rightly under- 
stood, all philosophy must be and is. But then 
experience has been identified with 4; sense," and sense 
has been considered only, or in the main, on its 
modal side, as a physico-mechanical process, to the 



32 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

exclusion of its other, essential and conditioning, 
side, — the side which Kant proceeded anew to point 
out, and the one whereby sense, or sensible experi- 
ence, reveals itself as grounded in an energy, or 
energies, of spirit. Thus " experience" has been, in 
principle, reduced to a superficial minimum, being 
regarded as a process in which the subject is essen- 
tially passive, and only mechanically acted upon by 
environing " objects." So, in Britain, the mechan- 
ical theory of sensible knowledge was developed as 
the theory of all knowledge, ending, with Hume, in 
those results of purely Subjective Idealism, Scepti- 
cism, or Agnosticism, — a veritable atony or astheny 
of thought, — which have been noted in the earlier 
part of this Introduction, and have been repeated 
by notable followers of Hume in Great Britain to 
the present day. 

Such, then, was the speculative atmosphere of the 
modern world, into which Kant was born, and in 
which he was reared. How completely he came 
under its palMike influence will appear in connec- 
tion with the following biographical details. What 
efforts he finally made to break through its spell 
and to regain the terra firma of man's living experi- 
ence, his monumental works disclose. 

Kant was educated at the university of his native 
city, and for nearly a half-century lectured within 
its walls. Never in his life joiner more than a few 
miles away from his birthplace, he studied men and 
events, at home and abroad, with the relish of a 
keen and thoughtful observer. In classical litera- 



INTRODUCTION. 33 

ture, especially that of the Latin poets, in mathe- 
matics, and in the physical science of his time, he 
was a vigorous adept. Of the truth of the last part 
of this statement Kant's earliest writings, which are 
almost all devoted to special or general physical 
problems, give abundant evidence. Indeed, the very 
first work of Kant, published when he was only 
twenty-three years of age, aimed at the composition 
of the strife between the Cartesians and the follow- 
ers of Leibnitz respecting the true formula for the 
expression of the constancy of the physical universe, 
and belonged to the same general order of discus- 
sions with those which have latterly resulted in the 
enunciation of the law of the Conservation of Energy. 
In this and other early writings Kant indicates the 
most comprehensive familiarity with the names and 
investigations of leading naturalists and physicists 
at home and abroad, — including, especially, New- 
ton, — and an absorbing and active interest in them. 
In 1755 he published a mechanical :; Theory of the 
Universe." which has caused him to be ranked with 
Laplace among the fathers of the modern nebular 
hypothesis. 

The original direction of Kant's mind was thus 
not exclusively, or even mainly, toward " metaphys- 
ical,'" or technically philosophical, problems; although 
in his physical works he indicates more or less a 
constant consciousness of metaphysical questions. 
He had been bred in the current metaphysics of 
his time, the so-called Leibnitz-Wolffian philosophy, 
in which the living thought of the acknowledged 
3 



34 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

master, Leibnitz, had been reduced to a systematic, 
but lifeless, and hence comparatively unins tractive; 
formalism. Through this, as will be subsequently 
seen, Kant nevertheless imbibed many a germ of 
real philosophic thought, but he was not hide-bound 
in this or in any other so-called metaphysical sys- 
tem. On the contrary, in his very first published 
work he expresses incidentally his distrust of all 
current metaphysics, by declaring that " our meta- 
physics, like many other sciences, has in fact only 
come to the threshold of real and solid knowledge, 
and God only knows when we shall see it step across 
the threshold." 

The growing influence of his predilection for 
physical inquiries, and of his increased and absorb- 
ing study of British writers, such as Newton, 
Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Hume, in increasing 
this distrust, and in leading him, for the time being, 
to identify " metaphysics," through psychology, with 
physical science, and the whole method of the former 
with the method of the latter, is indicated in grow- 
ing measure in the succeeding products of Kant's 
pre-critical thinking, and especially in a series of 
works belonging to the years 1763-1766.* Here 
we find Kant declaring that " the genuine method of 
metaphysics is substantially identical with that which 
Newton introduced into physical science, and which 

* The works referred to are especially the following: The Only Pos- 
sible Ground for a Demonstration of God's Existence, 1763; Inquiry 
concerning the Evidence of the Principles of ^Natural Theology and 
Ethics, 1764; and Dreams of a Visionary, illustrated by Dreams of 
Metaphysics, 1766. 



INTRODUCTION. 35 

has there been followed by such useful results. This 
method consists in seeking out, by assured experi- 
mental methods, and also with the aid of geometry, 
the rules according to which certain natural phe- 
nomena occur." Metaphysics must find its place 
' : on the lowly ground of experience [sic] and com- 
mon sense." Its " principal " work is to analyze the 
c ' confused " contents of consciousness, or our k " ideas." 
True, the " metaphysician " will not in this case get 
beneath the surface of the case under investigation, 
so as to understand its whole nature; he will still 
know only the phenomena. But he will have the 
consolation of reflecting that, once in possession of 
laws or of the final results of analysis, he may there- 
after, for his varied profit or instruction, employ 
them as a basis for the deductive determination of 
obscure questions of fact or for the practical guid- 
ance of life. As for those convictions which are 
'■ in the highest degree necessary for our happiness." 
and which do not concern or depend on the ascer- 
tainment of ;i the rules according to which phenom- 
ena occur" (since in fact they relate to the ultra- 
phenomenal or to the truly metaphysical), these 
have not been left ; * by Providence " to depend on 
subtle ratiocinations, but *' immediately communi- 
cated to the natural common sense of mankind." 
They are written immediately upon " the heart," 
and are the subject of a " moral belief." which is 
quite sufficient for all practical purposes, even 
though it may defy all theoretical justification. 
Here we find Kant adopting completely the atti- 



36 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

tude, and even copying the style and language, of 
the British moralists and psychologists. Here he 
touches philosophical low-water, reaching a point in 
his mental history where he must choose between 
floating henceforth upon a tide that never rises to 
philosophical knowledge, or making strenuous efforts 
to stem the tide and gain the rock-ribbed eminence 
that overlooks and sets bounds to its movements. 
We shall find that he chooses the latter course, and 
that he indeed " practically " (as he would term it) 
conquers a seat upon the eminence referred to, but 
that, half dazed by the brilliant prospect, half blind- 
ed by the old psychological prejudices, he does not 
literally believe his own eyes, but continues to the 
end to ascribe to an invincible moral " faith " what 
he dares not and, owing to the continuance of an 
equally invincible mechanistic prejudice, knows not 
how to hold as matter of " theoretical " knowledge. 

But the fact that Kaitt had thus at one time so 
completely identified himself in sympathy and con- 
viction with the British type of speculation, lends 
peculiar interest and instructiveness, for us English 
readers, to the history of the labor by which he 
sought to supplement and correct it. Only, as above 
noted, we have not learned our whole lesson from 
Kant until we have learned what those successors 
of Kant have to teach, who. in their turn, supple- 
mented and corrected him. 

It is interesting to note that, in the works of the 
brief period above alluded to, and especially in an 
4 ' Attempt to Introduce into Philosophy the Ooncep- 



INTKODUCXION. 37 

tion of Negative Magnitudes," published in 1763, 
Kant already gives marked evidence of the disturb- 
ance in his thought caused by Hume's negative 
conclusions respecting the nature of scientific causa- 
tion or law. It is well known to students of Kant 
that it was especially this disturbance, which imme- 
diately provoked Kant to the inquiries that resulted 
finally in the composition of the i; Critique of Pure 
Reason/' According to Hume, cause and effect meant 
only phenomena, which habitually succeed each other. 
Of "necessary connexion " between them there was 
asserted to be no discoverable trace. 4i Anything 
might be the cause of anything." In this way 
scientific law was eviscerated of all rational signifi- 
cance, 

Kant, now, was early struck with the singularity 
and apparent gravity of this conclusion, which, how- 
ever, he was unable to disprove, and so r for the time 
being, apparently accepted as final truth for man; 
but only for the time being. 

From the year 1755 until 1770 Kant's position in 
the University of Konigsberg had been only that 
of an independent lecturer, or ; " Privat-docent," pri- 
vileged to draw as many students to his lectures 
as he could, and to receive from them the usual 
fees, but holding no official appointment. In 1770 
he was made professor of logic and metaphysics, 
and in the Latin 4i inaugural dissertation," (on the 
" Form and Principles of the Sensible and the In- 
telligible World,") with which he entered upon 
the performance of his new functions, first gave 



38 KANT'S critique of pure reason. 

evidence of a newly-beginning revulsion from the 
psychological dogmatism in which, according to 
his own later confession, he had been u slumbering. " 
Then followed a period of ten years, in which " the 
Konigsberg thinker " rested almost wholly from 
literary activity and meditated the work which he 
finally composed, according to his own account, 
within four or five months, and gave to the world, 
in 1781, in a bulky volume entitled the " Critique 
of Pure Reason." In 1783 followed the " Prole- 
gomena, 1 ' a smaller, explanatory volume, or popular 
exposition of the Critique. A second edition of the 
Critique, revised and enlarged, was published in 
1787. 

As soon as the nature and purport of the Critique 
began to be perceived, the work was studied with 
the most absorbing attention, and through the press 
and in university lecture- rooms was discussed with 
the liveliest interest. The pedantries of scholastic 
formalism and other perplexing obscurities of style, 
in which the book was not deficient, could not con- 
ceal the fact that here a living, earnest voice was 
crying out of the wilderness of eighteenth-century 
formalism and superficialism and uttering a mes- 
sage, not lightly conceived, but thought out through 
3'ears of patient study, and addressed, not to 
the past, nor to some remote and abstract future, 
but to the immediate present and to its urgent 
intellectual needs. Whether, therefore, to be con- 
demned and reviled or to be approved and lauded, 
Kant's Critique quickly became the common theme 



INTRODUCTION. 39 

and starting-point for philosophical discussion.* Of 
no other single work can it more truly be said that 
it created an epoch in the history of philosophic 
thought. 

Besides the ;i Critique of Pure Reason," Kant wrote 
and published two other Critiques, the one (1788) on 
the ;i Practical Reason,' 1 and the other (1790) on the 
;i Faculty of Judgment." The first of the three Cri- 
tiques seeks to define and demonstrate the nature, 
conditions and limits of scientific or " theoretical " 
knowledge; the second, to ascertain the ground and 
enumerate all the implications, or necessary postu- 
lates, of our moral or " practical " conviction; and the 
third, to exhibit the nature and significance of those 
judgments of men, by virtue of which they under- 
take to declare, on the one hand, that some objects 
ar£ beautiful, others sublime, etc., (^Esthetic judg- 
ments,) and, on the other, that the operations of 
nature in general, and of organic nature in partic- 
ular, are purposeful or denote intelligence (Teleo- 
logical judgments). The three Critiques consti- 
tute an organic whole, and must all be considered 
together, in order rightly to estimate Kant's historic 
achievement and its relation, as stepping-stone and 
prophecy, to the completer work of his successors. 

The " Critique of Pure Reason," however, taken by 

* An interesting brochure by Prof. Matern Reuss. published in 1789, 
and in which a favorable answer is given to the question (of the title- 
page). '" Shall Kant's Philosophy be Explained at Catholic Universi- 
ties?" gives suggestive details in evidence of the general attention 
which was already given to Kant's Criticism at the German Universi- 
ties and elsewhere. 



40 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

itself, not only points the way to the other two 
works, but anticipates, in compendious form, their 
leading results. 

The main starting-point of the " Critique of Pure 
Reason," now, is to be found in the results of British 
sensational empiricism, as formulated by Hume. 
The work has then a double object or result, a proxi- 
mate or immediate and a remote or indirect one. 
Of these, again, the former is two-fold, consisting 

(a) in establishing the at least formal dependence of 
sensible knowledge, and especially of pure mathe- 
matical and physical science, on intellectual or spiri- 
tual, as well as mechanico-sensible, conditions, and 

(b) in enforcing the truth that the conceptions and 
method of physical science, as such, are irrelevant 
for the demonstration or disproof of truths which 
lie deeper than, or bej^ond, the immediate sphere of 
purely sensible phenomena. Through the first or 
immediate result, especially the second part of it, the 
remote or indirect one is reached, which is, to " se- 
cure a place for faith " (Crit. of P. P., Preface to 
2d ed.). For, Kant holds, not as a result of his in- 
quiry — the rather, in express opposition to its logi- 
cal implications — but as a result of the influence 
upon him of a blinding mechanistic prejudice of his 
age, that there is no knowledge, in the strict sense 
of the term, except such as is characteristically de- 
pendent and consequent upon the mechanical pro- 
cess of ''sensible affection." Whatever may be the 
influence of our own mental mechanism (as Kant 
conceives it) in determining the form which our 



INTRODUCTION. <±i 

knowledge may take, the latter is. in substance, so 
far as it is to be called true, objective knowledge, 
wholly physical. But the range of physical knowl- 
edge does not extend beyond the sphere of sensible 
phenomena. Noumena, or ' w things-in-themselves.'' 
are hence strictly, or " theoretically," unknowable. 
By knowledge, i.e. by physical science, we can de- 
termine nothing about them. If, therefore, we find 
ourselves subject to certain indefeasible moral con- 
victions, respecting God, Freedom, Immortality, and 
the Objective Beauty and Reason of the universe, 
we are left at liberty to fill up the space left vacant 
by knowledge, as the exigencies of our moral convic- 
tion or of a "rational faith" may require. And 
this is what Kant proceeds to do in his second and 
third Critiques. 

^Philosophy, as theoretical Science of Being, is 
thus not brought by Kant out of the woods of 
mechanism and formalism, and consequent subjec- 
tivism. But he, like a blind Samson, with powerful 
blows removed many obstacles of prejudice which 
lay in her way, giving an impulse and a cue to 
others who came after him, and who led philosophy 
further on." into the green meadows of objective 
reality." In particular, it is the merit of Kant to 
have enforced (after Leibnitz) the first and sim- 
plest lesson which modern times had to learn, as 
a precondition to the existence of philosophy in an 
independent and energetic form, — we mean the les- 
son of the exact ontological limitations of physical 
and mathematical science, and consequently of tha 



42 east's critique of pure reason. 

restricted range within which the peculiar meth- 
ods of such science suffice for the exhaustive ascer- 
tainment or demonstration of experimental truth. 
Whenever, therefore, and so far as the attempt is 
made to lift physical and mathematical science into 
the place of philosophy, the lesson of Kant has but 
to be pondered anew. Forty years after Kant's 
death this lesson was widely forgotten in his own 
country, and precisely the attempt just noted 
became very generally prevalent, though, as might 
have been foreseen, its results were only negative 
results. It is, therefore, one of the happier signs 
of the times — and in no sense surprising — that 
during the last ten or fifteen years " return to 
Kant " has been in Germany more and more the 
common watchword. The result has been, among 
other things, a voluminous addition, in the way of 
criticism, exposition, and commentary, to the litera- 
ture about Kant. The more important result must, 
and .undoubtedly will, be a return to those suc- 
cessors of Kant in whom his thought is completed ; 
or, still better, a return to philosophy and its pecu- 
liar method, irrespective of all the names, whether 
ancient or modern, which stand for its highest 
achievements. 

English psychology, which had most to learn from 
Kant, has learned least from him. It has known 
little of him, and comprehended still less. It is 
only latterly, since the study and illustration of 
Kant have been taken up by British scholars, who 
have traveled far enough in post-Kantian German 



INTRODUCTION". 43 

philosophy to appreciate Kant' s limitations as well 
as his merits, that solid and valuable contributions 
have been made in English to Kantian interpreta- 
tion. And, as relating especially to Kant's first 
Critique, the subject of this volume, it is a real 
pleasure to be able to point the English reader to 
works of such substantial merit as Edward CaircVs 
"The Philosophy of Kant" (Glasgow. 1877). Robert 
Adamson's four lectures i; On The Philosophy of 
Kant" (Edinburgh. 1879)*, and John Watson's 
;i Kant and his English Critics" (Glasgow and New 
York, 1881). 

Kant's " Critique of Pure Reason " has been twice 
translated into English, — first by F. Heywood (Lon- 
don, 1838), and next by M. D. Meiklejohn (London, 
Bohn, 1855). Of these the latter is in common use, 
though quite inadequate to conduct the English 
reader to the full sense of the original. A new 
translation, by Max Milller. is promised. 

In the present work the author has preferred to 
translate directly from the original such passages 
of the Critique as it was necessary to quote. By 
quotation-marks, and generally by the context, these 
passages are indicated. 

* Cf. Prof. Adamson's article on Kant, in the Encyclopaedia Brl- 
tannica, 9th ed., vol. xiii. 



KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE QUESTION STATED. 

WHAT is Experience? It is, at all events, 
something of which we are conscious. It is 
surely nothing of which we are not, either really or 
potentially, conscious. Perhaps, then, if we can 
succeed in making our ordinary consciousness and 
its whole history lie, as it were, before us, as a 
fixed, and determinate, and motionless object, like 
the dead body on an anatomist's table, capable of 
being dissected and otherwise analytically investi- 
gated, we may be able to answer the question. 
This is the " Baconian method,'' which works well 
in physical science; why should it not be followed 
with equal success in the present case? It is the 
historic method of English and Scotch psychology, 
and the final answer which it authorizes to our 
question is, that experience, or consciousness, is 
made up of an indefinitely numerous collection of 
conscious states, which differ among themselves only 
in respect of vividness, and which, while capable of 
being partially analyzed and described, are abso- 

44 



THE QUESTION' STATED. 45 

lately incapable (from the psychological point of 
view) of genetic explanation. 

The tautology of this conclusion — ; ' consciousness" 
made up of " conscious states," — is sufficiently obvi- 
ous. Its insufficiency, when compared with actual 
experience, is no less apparent. For experience is a 
living whole, rich in variety, but having its parts 
bound together in organic unity, while in the results 
of psychological analysis we find only a monotonous 
aggregate of lifeless "states." — the disconnected and 
independent atomic constituents of a consciousness 
which we must " murder," and hence absolutely dis- 
figure, ,; to dissect." In real conscious experience 
there is synthesis, which means simply that our con- 
sciousness is not atomicaily simple and incomplex. It 
is complex, and each element is bound to all the rest 
Jjv relations inherent in the nature of them all (logi- 
cal or "objective" relations, or syntheses), while all 
are also held together and sustained through their 
living and organic relation to the one and self-same, 
or ever personally identical, agent or " Ego," which 
is conscious or thinks. But among the conscious 
states which alone empirical psychology leaves us, 
there is no inherent synthesis, or relation. Each is, 
as Hume tells us, an M independent existence." a sort 
of atom of consciousness, which might exist by itself, 
even if there were no other atoms of like nature. 
It needs nothing beside itself for its own explana- 
tion. Indeed, it is incapable of explanation, and 
stands complete in itself as simply one unrelated, 
brute, inexplicable fact Moreover, since these states 



46 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

are in a constant flux, since no necessary relation is 
admitted among them, and since no self-conscious 
and ever self-identical agent or Ego is recognized, 
with power to hold them all together in its intelli- 
gent embrace, it follows strictly that at any given 
instant consciousness must consist only of one indi- 
visible state; it must be, as it were, an incomplex 
conscious point, without breadth or thickness, i.e. 
without distinguishable content. Thus, conscious- 
ness at any given instant, having no distinguishable 
content, is practically nothing, and consciousness as 
a whole is made up of such nothings, — all of which, 
unquestionably, is sufficiently absurd. 

Accordingly, empirical psychologists always pos- 
tulate, either expressly or by implication, certain 
synthetic " operations " of " mind," such as memory, 
comparison, etc., as being necessary to account for 
the obvious syntheses among conscious phenomena, 
though not strictly given among the latter; and then 
go on to cover up this evidence of their recreancy to 
their own principles by treating of these postulated 
14 powers 1 ' as if they, too, were only a special order 
of the phenomena or states which they were to ex- 
plain. They take advantage, however, of what they 
have thus gained, or stolen, from rational psycho- 
logy, to the extent that they allow conscious states, 
or " impressions " and " ideas,' 1 to come and to be 
perceived, not singly — which would be impossible — 
but in " bundles " or loose aggregates. A landscape 
is indeed practically perceived by us as a whole, and 
not simply as a succession of the sensible impres- 



THE QUESTION STATED. 47 

sions which the different points of the landscape 
must produce. The setting of the sun is indeed 
viewed by us as one connected process, and not 
simply as a pure succession of perceptions, the pres- 
ence of each of which implies the total exclusion from 
consciousness of all which preceded it. There are, 
indeed, at least such "phenomena" as memory and 
expectation. So much of synthesis is practically 
admitted. But then the contention is. that any con- 
stant relations which apparently subsist among the 
phenomena are fortuitous and mechanical, or purely 
" empirical/' and that they are in no sense inher- 
ently necessary and universal, or at least cannot 
be known to be so. All our knowledge is from, of, 
and strictly confined to, " experience,'' they say, — 
meaning by experience the whole collection of our 
sensible, but wholly unaccountable, i; impressions and 
ideas,'' and nothing else. The world, it is held, is 
not incarnate reason, nor is the knowing mind or 
spirit of man impersonated reason. At all events, 
if this is so, it cannot be known to be so. It is not 
implied or given in the facts, or, consequently, in the 
true theory or account of knowledge or experience. 
Knowledge or experience is a mechanical accident, 
and nothing else. 

Now, Kant at the very outset takes issue with this 
account of experimental knowledge. He declares 
that, as matter of obvious and notorious fact, while 
all our knowledge, considered with reference to its 
objective or material substance, may begin with, and 
ever depend on, sensible impressions, or ' ; experi- 



48 KANT'S critique of pure reason. 

ence," as understood by the sensational psychologist, 
there is nevertheless an element contained in it 
which does not spring from this source. Kant does 
not, as he well might, stop to contend that that 
minimum of 'merely mechanical, and hence lifeless 
and accidental, synthesis which the empirical psy- 
chologists admit under the name of " association " or 
" habitual succession," is not contained in the origi- 
nal data of empirical psychology — namely, sensible 
impressions and their copies, or atoms of conscious 
state, — but is abstracted by them from that realm 
of living and ultra- mechanical experience into which 
they, like all other men, are born, but to which they 
resolutely seek to shut their eyes. He does not stop 
now to point out that thus experience, as finally 
viewed by the empirical psychologist himself, already 
contains an element which, from a strict interpreta- 
tion of the psychologist's own premises or point of 
view, is non-empirical or " a priori" He concedes 
the so-called "principles" of accidental association 
and habitual succession as something which, for the 
time being at least, it is not worth while to strive 
about, and declares that, as matter of fact, our 
knowledge does contain elements which these prin- 
ciples — or which the empirical psychologist's "ex- 
perience," of which these principles express the 
highest reach — cannot explain. Through no obser- 
vation, namely, of the accidental association of sen- 
sible impressions and ideas, however long continued, 
could we ever become aware of truths which are 



THE QUESTION STATED. 49 

strictly and self-evidently necessary and universal.* 
Habitual association and succession can never induce 
the perception of an absolutely necessary and univer- 
sal connection of ideas. This indeed was also asserted 
by Hume, who accordingly denied that such connec- 
tion was in fact ever perceived. We might think 
that we perceived it, but in reality we were subject 
to a delusion, which habit was sufficient to explain. 

Nay, but, says Kant, it is not a delusion, or, if 
the. contrary be true, then are we deluded in all our 
most valued and solidly demonstrative sciences. All 
of the propositions of pure mathematics express 
truths which, by universal consent, are absolutely 
necessary and universal. Nay, the commonest un- 
derstanding constantly employs principles of like 
character, such as, for example, this, that " all 
change must have a cause." Not only is mankind 
in possession of manifold propositions, principles, or 
"judgments," which, being intrinsically universal 
and necessary, must be termed a priori, or inde- 
pendent of contingent experience, it also possesses 
single notions to which a like quality and name 
must be ascribed. Such, for example, are the 
notions of space and substance, which remain, inde- 
feasible and irremovable, when abstraction has been 
made from every possible impression of sense. 

These facts, Kant in substance maintains, are too 

* Necessity and universality were the marks by which Leibnitz had 
taught that "eternal," non-empirical or intelligible "•truths' 1 were to 
be distinguished from contingent truths of merely empirical or sensi- 
ble "fact." 
4 



50 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

obvious and notorious to be affected by the denials 
or destructive "explanations" of the sensational 
psychologist. The only, and the important, question 
is, what do they signify? or ;i how are they possible?" 
To what mechanism or constitution of knowing 
mind do they point, and to what conclusions as to 
the nature, or ontological significance, and the con- 
sequent range, or possible limits, of human knowl- 
edge? What sort of a process is knowledge, and 
what can and do we know? This is the question 
for which the " Critique of Pure Reason " proposes 
to find an answer. 

The highly scholastic and technical form in which 
Kant summarily states the question is as follows: 
;i How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?" 
This form results with him from a brief analysis 
of the following distinctions. 

All our knowledge is either a priori or a posteri- 
ori. A posteriori is whatever knowledge is given 
in uncriticised sensible experience, — or in sensible 
experience as including sensible impressions or 
states, x)lus the, for the present, unquestioned, so- 
called principles of association and habit. A priori 
is whatever knowledge is not thus given, or what- 
ever is universal and necessary. 

Again, all knowledge, or its expression, assumes 
the form of a stated proposition or logical judgment. 
But all judgments are either analytical or synthetic. 
In an analytical judgment the predicate is contained 
in the subject and flows from it according to the 
principle of identity. For example, " All bodies are 



THE QUESTION STATED. 51 

extended." We have but to reflect upon what our 
notion of body implicitly contains, to see that, in 
thinking ;t body," we think also the attribute " exten- 
sion." Such judgments are all a priori, but are 
thought to present no difficulty and to call for no 
further explanation of their " possibility." 

In a synthetic judgment, on the contraiy, the 
predicate does not flow from an analysis of the 
subject. Here there is true syn-thesis, or putting 
together, in one proposition or assertion, of terms 
that at first sight are not homogeneous or insepara- 
ble. For example, " All bodies are heavy." Our 
first notion or sensible impression of ;i body " carries 
with it and includes in it no notion or impression 
of ''weight." Weight is not attributed to body by 
virtue of our possession of the simple idea or sensu- 
ous image of body, but on the ground of objective 
experience and investigation, which, accordingly, 
enables us to enrich our original idea by adding to 
it something that it did not originally contain. 

Now synthetic judgments are either a posteriori 
or a priori. The former, being founded on contin- 
gent experience, are permitted, along with this 
experience, to pass, for the present, unquestioned, 
as requiring no further explanation of their "pos- 
sibility." The latter, or synthetic judgments a 
priori, being ideally independent of contingent ex- 
perience, must be challenged, and inquiry must be 
instituted (a) as to the ground of their possibility, 
or the mechanism or constitution of a mind which is 
actually " in possession " of them, and (b) as to the 



52 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASOX. 

warrant of their applicability, or the conditions 
upon which we may rely "upon them as leading us, 
not into error, but into truth, or into trustworthy 
knowledge. 

Such is the explanation of the form of the main 
question — "How are synthetic judgments a priori 
possible ?" — and such are its implications. But 
since " synthetic judgments a priori " are found in, 
and indeed constitute the substance or basis of, 
several different (real or alleged) sciences, the ques- 
tion is capable of subdivision, according as it is 
viewed in its relation to the case of these sciences, 
severally. 

In mathematics Kant maintains that all judg- 
ments are synthetic, and at least all of those which 
belong to pure mathematics are also a priori. 
Similar a priori judgments are attributed by Kant 
to physical science, as specimens of which he cites 
the doctrine of the persistence of matter, without in- 
crease or diminution of quantity, in the midst of all 
the physical changes of the universe, and the law of 
the equality of physical action and reaction. These 
two sciences really exist; they must, therefore, un- 
questionably be possible, and the main question in 
its relation to them may be formulated in the two 
following questions: (1) " How is Pure Mathematics 
possible?" and (2) "How is Pure Physical Science 
possible?" 

There exists, further, an alleged science, called 
Metaphysics, which professes to establish synthetic 
propositions respecting such non-sensible or a priori 



THE QUESTION STATED. 53 

matters as the World in its Totality, or considered 
with reference (for example) to its limitation or non- 
limitation in space and time, God, Freedom, and 
Immortality. Now, even if we admit that this pro- 
fession has, up to the present, been wholly vain, 
yet it is a perfectly serious and earnest profession, 
and flows from a natural quality of human reason, 
or from a disposition to inquiry and a need for 
speculative satisfaction, so indestructibly innate in 
man, that we may be sure that in some form or 
other metaphysics will always be cultivated. We 
are justified then, at all events, in asking, (3) " How 
is man's Natural Propensity to Metaphysics pos- 
sible?" 

But, finally, even if metaphysics as a true and 
demonstrable science has never yet existed, yet surely 
it must in the end be possible to come to some sort 
of final decision respecting the questions which it 
raises, so that metaphysics shall finally exist, either 
as positive science of the objects of metaphysical in- 
quiry, or as science of the limits which are inter- 
posed between human reason and the highest objects 
of its search. And so the fourth and final question 
will be, (4) " How is Metaphysics as a Science possi- 
ble?" 

It is thus that Kant, in the "Prolegomena, " and in 
the second edition of the " Critique of Pure Reason," 
maps out the ground of his inquiry. This inquiry 
he terms " transcendental," and its results " trans- 
cendental knowledge." This does not mean that the 
discussion turns on the nature of il things," which 



54 HANTS CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

may lie beyond and so transcend the limits of our 
experience, and consequently of all our possible in- 
formation. The pretended investigation and knowl- 
edge of such "things" Kant terms "transcendent" 
and, of course, wholly fanciful. Transcendental 
knowledge relates, not to the " things " or " objects " 
known, but to the process by which they are known, 
or to the knowing mind. It is the knowledge, sci- 
ence, or theory, of knowledge itself, but with es- 
pecial reference to that side or aspect of knowledge 
which " transcends " the contingent or mechanico- 
sensible element in experience. It regards that 
element in knowledge, or, at least, that form of 
knowledge, which is a priori or ideally independent 
of such contingent element. A complete "Trans- 
cendental Philosophy " would be a systematic expo- 
sition and demonstration of all that is a priori in 
human knowledge, or of " all the principles of pure 
reason. " The Ci Critique of Pure Reason " is less than 
this, for it takes account only, or but principally, of 
the synthetic element or quality in a priori knowl- 
edge. 

Or, to put the whole matter (following Kant) in 
another way. The tree of human knowledge has 
two trunks, the roots of which, being invisible, are 
beyond the range, of possible investigation, but may, 
for aught we know, be identical. Each trunk gives 
off its separate branches. Neither is or can be 
without the other. Each is necessary for the exist- 
ence of the other. Of one of them the name is 
Sense; of the other, Understanding. Through the 



THE QUESTION STATED. 55 

former objects of knowledge are given, through the 
latter they are thought or " understood,'' i.e. are 
made or become real objects of knowledge. The 
one furnishes the contingent or " empirical " mate- 
rial of knowledge, the other its necessary and uni- 
versal form. Understanding transcends sense, just 
as the necessary and universal transcends the con- 
tingent. But it does not transcend real experience, 
any more than sense transcends it, since, the rather, 
it is, like sense, an indispensable part and condition 
of experience. We may foresee, therefore, that the 
sensational psychologist's conception of experience 
will have to be revised and enlarged, so as to take 
in the necessary and universal, as well as the acci- 
dental and particular. Nay, more, we may find 
that sense itself, the peculiar alleged faculty of the 
contingent, contains, as essential to the fixity and 
reality of its own nature and functions, a necessary 
and universal element. However this may be, the 
fact is that in all experience there is a rational, or 
necessary and universal, element. Knowledge, or 
knowing mind, has a fixed and determinate nature, 
and this nature is revealed or discoverable in real 
experience. Transcendental philosophy does not 
therefore need or profess to attempt the impossible 
by seeking to transcend experience. It is simply (so 
far as it goes) the revelation of experience to itself. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE NON-CONTINGENT FORM OF SENSE. 

~| TPON close inspection it turns out that the facts 
^ of the case confirm the suggestion that sense 
itself, which sensational psychology treats as being 
not only the sole faculty, and hence the whole, of 
mind, but also and peculiarly a faculty of the con- 
tingent, contains a necessary and universal element. 
How, indeed, could this be otherwise ? For sense, 
surely, is not simply identical with the objects of 
sense, or the materials of sensitive knowledge. 
Grant that the latter are contingent, yet there must 
somewhere be something — some invariable element, 
form, or quality — by virtue of which they are all 
designated by the common name of sensible. In 
other words, sense, if it mean anything, must be 
definable ; in which case it must have some fixed 
character or characters by which it may be once for 
all described and known. Of the absolutely chang- 
ing and contingent there is no definition, no name, 
no knowledge. 

Or, to return to the peculiar language of psy- 
chology. Conscious states, which are the original 
units and mark the final limits of knowledge for 
sensational psychology, must have something in com- 
mon, by virtue of which they are all called con- 



THE NON-CONTINGENT FORM OF SENSE. 57 

scions. And it is easy to see that this common ele- 
ment will be found not in the changing matter or 
felt content of these states, but in their form. It 
will be something which can be abstractedly con- 
ceived apart from or independently of the states, 
though the latter cannot be conceived or " had " 
apart from it ; and so it will be, according to the 
Kantian sense of this expression, a priori. Further, 
it will be some thing which holds or binds together in 
real organic unity the conscious elements — " impres- 
sions," " states," — which without such unity are so 
inherently diverse and independent of each other, 
so absolutely unrelated, that they cannot be parts of 
one common consciousness. Sense is, indeed, recep- 
tive — as Kant terms it, and as sensational psychol- 
ogy regards it ; — it is receptive form, and it is, 
with reference to what it receives (conscious states 
or impressions), an a priori receptive form. But it 
has not, or is not, therefore the form of a receptacle 
or vessel, into which " materials " of knowledge may, 
as it were, be dumped, or may dump themselves, 
without any reference to their order or arrange- 
ment, and without having any new mark placed 
upon them. In this case the materials, after being 
caught and confined, would continue to be merely 
what they were before, namely, nothing but mate- 
rials, still unused, still unreduced to consciousness, 
not yet made materials of knowledge. No, it is not 
enough that the diverse elements of consciousness be 
collected together in the superficial and mechanical 
unity of a mere mass or aggregate. Their unity 



58 KANT'S critique of pure reason. 

must be organic. Each element, like each member 
of any living organism, must, in its due way, place 
and relation, bear the impress and express the idea 
or form of the whole. The u form" of sense must 
not be merely receptive, not merely a mechanically- 
fixed and lifeless shape or mould ; it must be forma- 
tive, capable of communicating itself to all that it 
receives, just as the creative idea of any organism — 
of a tree, for example — communicates itself to, and 
expresses itself in and through, the materials which 
it takes up into its own life. It must make its 
" objects " veritable parts of itself, so that it may 
live and be visibly present in all of them, while they 
all, in their turn, live or exist only in and through it. 
So it will be actively all-pervading, all-comprehend- 
ing, all-moulding, and will consequently be in the 
true sense a living, i.e. ideal, spiritual principle or 
function. It will be necessary and universal with 
the true or concrete necessity and universality of 
mind. It will hold or bind together its so-called 
" contents " in a synthetic or unifying embrace, 
whereby it will so identify these contents with itself 
and itself with them, that it will become indeed 
necessary to the reality of all, and so universally 
present in all. In short, being truly synthetic or 
organic, it will be truly " transcendental," or a sub- 
ject for " transcendental " inquiry. 

So, then, sense itself cannot be wholly " empiri- 
cal" or contingent. It is not simply changing 
state; it is also, on another side, definite and fixed, 
yet living and active, function. Sense itself trans- 



THE NOX-CONTINGENT FORM OF SENSE. 59 

cends the provisional conception of it which was 
adopted at the outset from sensational psychology. 
In sense itself mind is present with an unchanging 
nature, law and power of its own. To this extent, 
therefore, sense, which was at first contrasted with 
understanding, must the rather be assimilated to it, 
and Kant's suggestion, that these two trunks of 
human knowledge may spring from a common root, 
begins to acquire more than the probability which 
belongs to a mere guess. At all events, there is a 
non-contingent element in sense, the nature and 
implications of which furnish a subject of transcen- 
dental inquiry and investigation. Such Kant finds 
to be the case, and so he is able to entitle the first sec- 
tion of the " Critique of Pure Reason," which treats 
of this element, " Transcendental ^Esthetic," or doc- 
trine of the transcendental element in " sense " itself. 

The Transcendental ^Esthetic contains, in germ 
and in necessary intention, all that has been above 
said respecting the relation which must exist be- 
tween the fixed form of sense and its contingent 
content, and respecting the necessary nature of the 
former. Kant's own conduct of the discussion, 
which is somewhat mechanical and dogmatic, is as 
follows. 

In order to ascertain what the form of sense is, 
we are first required to distinguish sharply between 
it and understanding. Sense perceives, the under- 
standing conceives. The form of sense will then be 
something peculiar to immediate perception, as dis- 
tinguished from mediate or reflective conception. 



60 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

Next, we must separate from perception every 
element that is not involved in all perceptions, 
i.e. the variable or contingent element, whereby 
conscious states are particularized and differen- 
tiated from each other; the element which, as 
we say, implies and flows from the presence or 
agency of an object impressing or affecting us; in 
short, that which is called particular or material 
sensation. If perception of particular objects 
through the appropriate particular sensations be 
called mixed or contingent perception, the universal 
and necessary form of all perceptions will be fit- 
tingly termed pure perception, or pure form of per- 
ception. 

When these two conditions have been complied 
with, Kant asserts that there will be found remain- 
ing (a) " two pure forms of sensuous perception," 
which, as such, are (b) transcendental, and hence 
" principles of a priori knowledge," and that these 
two forms are Space and Time. 

(a) By what he terms a " metaphysical exposi- 
tion " of the ideas of space and time, separately, 
Kant seeks to show that space and time are both 
pure forms of sensuous perception. 

It is to be noted first that, whatever else may or 
may not be true respecting space and time, the one 
of them is known only in, or in connection with, 
external perception, and the other only in internal 
perception. " Time cannot be perceived externally, 
nor can space be perceived as something in us." If 
both are forms of sensuous perception, we may infer 



THE NON-CONTINGENT FORM OF SENSE. 61 

beforehand that space will be the peculiar form of 
external, and time of internal, sense. 

11 What, now,'' asks Kant, ,; are space and time ? 
Are they real entities? Or are they attributes or 
relations of things, such as would belong to things, 
even though the latter were not perceived? Or are 
they, finally, attributes or relations belonging only 
to the form of perception, and flowing consequently 
from the subjective quality or make-up of our minds, 
so that, but for the latter, these predicates could not 
and would not be applied to any thing ? " 

The form and substance of these questions have 
upon them a strong flavor of eighteenth-century 
psychological " metaphysics." It will be noted, fur- 
ther, that the last of them foreshadows the kind of 
ontological inference which Kant will draw from his 
promised demonstration that space and time are 
pure forms of perception. 

In the " metaphysical exposition," which furnishes 
Kant's answer to the foregoing questions, it is urged 
that 

(1) Space and time are not empirical notions, de- 
rived by abstraction from particular external and 
internal experiences as such. On the contrary, these 
experiences, or the perception of objects as existing 
externally to each other or following each other, all 
presuppose in their respective cases the ideas of 
space and time. The perception of particular co- 
existing objects presupposes and is only possible 
through the logically antecedent and independent 
idea of space. The perception of particular objects. 



62 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

as succeeding the one the other, presupposes and is 
only possible through the logically antecedent and 
independent idea of time. 

(2) Space and time are necessary a priori ideas 
and the conditions of all particular perceptions. 
"From the latter and their objects we can in imagi- 
nation, without exception, abstract; from the former 
we cannot. Space and time are therefore to be re- 
garded as the necessary a priori preconditions of the 
possibility and reality of all phenomena. 

(3) Space and time are not general or "discur- 
sive " conceptions of relations of things, but pure 
perceptions (Anseliamoigen). A general conception 
is derived from comparison of several specimens of 
the class or collection of objects to which the con- 
ception applies. But there is no class or collection 
of either spaces or times. We may indeed, and do, 
speak of different places and times, but with the 
consciousness that these are all only limitations and 
portions of one universal or absolute space and one 
universal or absolute time. Space is one, and time 
is one, and the only idea we can have of an object, of 
which only one specimen exists or can exist, is neces- 
sarily a perceptional one. Space and time are, with 
reference to all perceptions or conceptions of par- 
ticular parts, limitations or qualifications of space 
and time, simple a priori perceptions, which under- 
lie them all. 

(4) The foregoing view alone is consistent with 
the necessity we are under, of ascribing ' ; infinity " 
or non-limitation to space and time. If all special 



THE XOX-t OXTIXGEXT FORM OF SEXSE. 63 

places and times are conceivable only through limi- 
tation of one universal space and time, it is obvious 
that these latter, as such, are and must be only 
conceivable with the attribute of non-limitation. 
Further, it is argued that if space and time were 
discursive conceptions, and not perceptions, or in- 
tuitions, we could not. as we do, regard them as 
containing each an infinite number of parts. A 
conception represents, after all, only a fictitious 
whole or aggregate, made up exclusively of individ- 
uals, which are first known and in which alone 
reality resides. To have, in this sense, a conception, 
which should include in itself an infinite number 
of individuals or " parts," it would, strictly viewed, 
be necessary to have taken previous account of each 
one of the individuals, — an obvious impossibility. 
human life being too short for such a task. But in 
the case of space and time, as we have seen, the 
ideas of the parts are logically posterior to the ideas 
of the continuous and undivided wholes; and we do. 
as matter of fact, and are compelled to. think of 
the number of parts as potentially unlimited, 
although we have never counted and can never 
count them. Hence it appears with added evidence 
that our original ideas of time and space are imme- 
diate and not derivative, perceptional or intuitional, 
and not conceptional. a priori, and not contingent 
or " empirical.' 1 

In short, space and time seem to constitute de- 
monstrably the peculiar form of sense which was 
required. This becomes more evident through the 



64 kant's critique of pure reason. 

" Transcendental Exposition,' 1 to which Kant next 
proceeds, and in which he shows that space and time 
are " principles of a priori knowledge," and that, 
too, of a synthetic character, in those sciences in 
which the most complete certainty is, by universal 
admission, reached. 

(b) There is a science called Geometry, which sets 
up axioms and demonstrates truths a priori, respect- 
ing absolute spatial relations. Such axioms could 
not be declared, and such truths could not be demon- 
strated, if space were not such a form of perception 
as has above been indicated. For the ' : judgments " 
on which geometry is founded and to which it 
proceeds, being necessary and universal, possess a 
quality, which could never belong to them in our 
knowledge, if space and its attributes, to which 
those judgments relate, were simple matter of con- 
tingent perception or " experience." In the latter 
case, we should not be able to affirm (for example), 
as a truth of absolute necessity, that any two points 
are joined by one, and by only one, straight line. 
We could at most merely say that such we find to 
be the case in all instances that we have examined, 
but that concerning the infinitely numerous in- 
stances which we have not examined, and can never 
examine, we can assert nothing. The truth in ques- 
tion would possess for us thus only comparative, 
and not necessary and absolute, universality. The 
a priori nature of geometrical judgments confirms, 
therefore, our conclusion respecting the a priori 
nature of space, and the latter, in turn, explains 



THE NON-CONTINGENT FORM OF SENSE. 05 

the possibility of the former. But, further, geo- 
metrical judgments, in common with all the propo- 
sitions of pure mathematics, are in the first instance 
synthetic, and not analytical. Through no mere 
analytic contemplation of the abstract conceptions 
of points and straight lines, exclusively and strictly 
by themselves, can we deduce the conclusion that 
the straight line is the shortest one between two 
points. Subject and predicate are not here ab- 
stractly and analytically identical. The judgment is 
synthetic, and can result only from direct compari- 
son in the field of immediate, perceptive intuition. 
Except, therefore, the idea of space constitute an a 
priori and synthetic, — nay, more, a constructive. — 
form of our sensibility, neither the synthetic nor 
the universal and necessary character of geometrical 
judgments is at all comprehensible. The foregoing 
explanation of space, therefore, alone accounts, in 
Kant's view, for the possibility of pure geometry. 

Similarly, the analogous explanation of time is 
shown to account alone for the possibility of other 
branches of pure mathematical science, and espe- 
cially of arithmetic, " which produces its concep- 
tions of numbers by successive synthesis of units in 
time," and pure mechanics, whose notion of motion is 
only possible in and through the idea of time. In- 
deed, this " idea,'* or, rather, this actively synthetic, 
formative, ideal principle of sensitive mind, is the 
condition of geometry itself, as it is of all i; external " 
or objective " sense." For, as Kant points out, the 
so-called external is known, universally, only through 



66 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

the internal, the sensibly objective only through and 
in the sensibly subjective, i.e. as a part of conscious- 
ness, of which time is the universal form. Moreover, 
the spatial intuition, whereby pure geometrical rela- 
tions are perceived, is an actively synthetic one. It 
involves a sweep of perceptive imagination, whereby, 
as Kant sa'ys, the mathematician il constructs " his 
objects, placing them in a pure space which he 
creates for them; and this action, or ideal motion, 
like all motion, is possible only through time. 

Kant, then, through his doctrine of space and 
time, solves* or claims to solve, the essential or char- 
acteristic difficulty involved in the first subdivision 
of the main question of the Critique, namely, How 
is Pure Mathematics possible ? And in so doing he 
has indicated the first and fundamental condition of 
all purely physical science whatsoever.. For, as Kant 
somewhere says, the amount of real science con- 
tained in any physical science is strictly measured 
by the amount of mathematics which it contains. 
For the objects of inquiry, with which physical 
science is concerned, are phenomena, all of which are 
essentially qualified by their dependent relation to 
time and space and to their relations. Indeed, 
mathematics may, in all strictness considered, even 
be itself regarded as pure or idealized physical sci- 
ence. It determines those absolute relations which 
all physical relations must approximately illustrate, 
and b}^ which, as the standard of comparison, the 
latter can alone be estimated and known ; and for 
its absolute relations mathematics finds an accurate 



THE NOK-CONTIXGENT FORM OF SENSE. 67 

expression in formulated equations, which physical 
science is compelled to emulate as its only and indis- 
pensable model of expression. 

But have not the conclusions which Kant has 
reached still wider bearings? Apart from their ser- 
vice in explaining the mental machineiy, without 
which certain actually existing sciences could not 
exist, have they no relation to the philosophical 
question concerning the absolute nature of things ? 
Unquestionably they have, and Kant, in setting forth 
his view of this relation, gives abundant evidence of 
the fact that the struggle in which he is engaged 
against the narrownesses and misconceptions of 
modern thought, while not a mock-heroic one, but 
genuine, is yet, in his ease, still far from being ended; 
the rather, it is only begun; the adversary — psy- 
chological and. sensuous or mechanistic prejudice — 
has him still by the throat and is throwing dust in 
his eyes; philosophic truth is not through Kant's 
efforts yet completely victorious. Brute, dead, ab- 
stract fact of mechanical or sensible consciousness is 
not yet illuminated, and so set in its own true light, 
by truth of living, spiritual, concrete and all-condi- 
tioning self-consciousness. Mechanistic dualism, such 
as the earlier and, in Kant's time, still current meta- 
physics and psychology had assumed, has not }<et 
been merged in organic unity. The notion of dead, 
inert, opaque Substance, as synonym of absolute 
reality, has not yet given place to that of living, 
forceful, self-luminous and all-illuminating Spirit. 



68 KANT'S critique of pure reason.' 

And yet it is in the direction of all these transforma- 
tions that Kant's work is pointing. 

What, then, is Kant's own conception and state- 
ment of the ontological bearings and results of his 
"Transcendental ^Esthetic"? It is that space and 
time are in no wise " things," entities, real and 
independent existences, nor are they in any way 
related to such existences, as attributes or qualifica- 
tions of any sort. They are nothing but condition- 
ing forms of human sensibility or of sensuous con- 
sciousness. They are purely and only subjective. 
They are indeed universal and necessary for us. 
They are a part of the determinate and indefeasible 
nature of our minds. No " objects" can be given 
us for knowledge, except we receive them into these 
unchanging forms of ours. But when we thus see 
or are aware of objects, w T hen we perceive them in 
space and time, we see them, not in their own light 
or form, but only in our own. A being, privileged 
to perceive things independently of the conditions of 
human sensibility, — a being, the form of whose per- 
ception should not be, like ours, simply receptive, 
but creative (or, at least, re-creative), not sensible, 
but intellectual, and so adequate to the knowledge 
of things in their absolute reality, or of " things-in- 
tbemselves," — would see and realize that space and 
time have nothing to do with them. 

All our sensible experience, therefore, and hence 
(as Kant dogmatically affirms) all our knowledge, is 
ontologically limited to phenomena, or to apparent, 
not absolute, objects clad in the determining forms 



THE NON-CONTINGENT FORM OF SENSE. G9 

of space and time. The contingent element in con- 
sciousness, our particular sensations, is that which 
corresponds to and suggests the invincible belief in 
real things, but in no wise resembles or truly re- 
veals them. Indeed, our sensations are. as such, so 
far from truly revealing to us any absolute reality, 
that they are absolutely unintelligible, except so far 
as order is introduced among them, through their 
injection into the absolute framework of ideal rela- 
tions involved in our intuitions of space and time. 
All that is intelligible to us is thus strictly confined 
to or determined by the form of our own (" sen- 
sible ") knowledge. The world of " theoretical " 
knowledge and the world of physical science, or, 
what is the same thing, of sensibly conditioned con- 
sciousness, are identical, and in this world we find 
absolutely nothing but phenomena of extension, 
or ;i configuration/' and of motion, or ;: change of 
place," plus the rules or "laws," according to which 
such change, whether habitually or necessarily, takes 
place. Space and time possess for us ;i empirical 
reality, *' and, in the only sense in which anything 
can be objective for us, " objective validity."' But 
absolute reality, or absolutely objective validity, they 
have not. They are transcendental, because they 
constitute an a priori, or necessary and universal, 
form of our knowledge. But, since this is all that 
is true of them, they are also, and only, intrinsically 
"ideal'' (= "'subjective*'), and we must ascribe to 
them, in Kant's scholastic phrase, " transcendental 
ideality."" 



70 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

As against Locke, now, and the whole so-called 
philosophy of empiricism, Kant, thus far, sufficiently 
demonstrates that in our sensible experience we, or 
our " minds," are not wholly like tabulce rasce, or 
like " pieces of white paper, on which nothing has 
been written.'" This comparison has a certain 
degree of justness, but to make it complete we 
should invest the " white paper," in imagination, 
with the qualities of a powerful chemical reagent, 
w^hich transmutes into wholly unexpected forms 
whatever comes into contact with it, or with ka- 
leidoscopic properties, whereby materials, existing 
in confused and changing order, are made con- 
stantly to appear in forms of definite and beauti- 
ful relation. Mind, or, rather, knowledge, — for of 
mind per se we are held to be as ignorant as of any 
other u thing-in-itself," — has a fixed and determi- 
nate, — nay, more, a self-determining, — nature, even 
when its objects are what are termed " sensible "; 
and so it is made out, as against Hume and sen- 
sational psychology, that in no kind of knowledge 
are we left completely to the mere mercy of chance 
and blind habit. All knowledge is subject to abso- 
lute a priori forms, which are independent of the 
contingent matter of knowledge, and to which, as 
w r e have seen, this matter must adapt itself, in 
order to become even relatively knowable. 

On the other hand, Hume and empirical psychol- 
ogy must, if Kant is to be believed, be justified by 
us in their assertion that matter per se or mind per 
se, or any other absolute " substance " or " thing-in- 



THE NON-CONTINGENT FORM OF SENSE. 71 

itself." is beyond any possible range of our knowl- 
edge. Nothing can be known, we are told, unless 
it be " given " or sensibly presented to us for 
knowledge, or " affect " us, and nothing can be 
effectually given unless it be received: — we cannot 
be affected unless we consciously receive the af- 
fection. But both the receiving and the consequent 
affection or impression are alleged to be purely 
subjective; the one as pertaining to the form, the 
other to the matter, of human sensibility or sensi- 
tive consciousness. This doctrine is " idealistic " 
(in the all too current modern sense of this term), 
but it is the doctrine of a Critical or Transcenden- 
tal Idealism, and so, as Kant claims, advantageously 
distinguished from the Sceptical or Agnostic Ideal- 
ism of empirical " philosophy.'" 

Of Kant's " Critical Idealism," in its substance 
and motives, we shall have occasion to treat more 
in detail in a subsequent chapter (chap. VI). Here 
we have only to remark upon it, so far as it is 
ostensibly distinguished from Sceptical or Empirical 
" Idealism " by Kant's peculiar doctrine respecting 
the nature of space and time. In this connection 
we have to consider two things, — (a) the positive 
substance of Kant's account of space and time, or 
what he positively demonstrates respecting their 
real nature, and (b) the limitation which he places 
upon them with reference to their ontological sig- 
nificance. Let us take up the latter point first. 

Kant declares that space and time are exclusively 
" subjective," meaning by this that they are only 



kaxt's critique of pure reason. 

forms of our sensible consciousness. They corre- 
spond to nothing which is contained in the real 
nature, whether of the absolute subject or of the 
absolute object. The latter are both " things-in- 
themselves," and, as such, are, together with all that 
pertains to them, unknowable. 

Now, this negative part of Kant's doctrine is 
purely dogmatic. It does not flow from anything 
which he has demonstrated respecting the positive 
nature of space and time. Nor is it novel. It is 
the ordinary doctrine of Subjective Idealism, and 
results, for Kant, from his tacit assumption, at the 
outset, of the premises, which always lead to Sub- 
jective Idealism; or, rather, it results from Kant's 
failure to question them. What these premises 
are, has been indicated in our Introduction (above, 
pp. 11 et seq.). They are, in brief, the purely me- 
chanical conception of the relation between con- 
scious subject and object, and the consequent purely 
materialistic conception (in spite of all protests to 
the contrary) of the absolute nature of subject and 
object. These are Hume's premises, and that Kant 
also still adheres to them is naively indicated by 
him in arguments by which he seeks to prove what 
he calls the " transcendental ideality," or, in other 
words, the purely phenomenal, " subjective " qual- 
ity of space and time. If. he argues, space and 
time were really and absolutely objective. — if they 
possessed or were related to absolute reality or 
being, — they must be either independent entities or 
" things," or else inherent attributes of such entities. 



THE KUNT-CONTINGEST FORM OF SENSE. 73 

They must be either " subsistent " or "inherent," 
i.e. either substances or properties of. substances, 
and against both of these alternatives Kant easily 
finds persuasive arguments. Here, then, Kant, for 
the purposes of his argument, adopts as a conception 
of the absolutely real, the conception of " thing " 
or :: substance." This is a materialistic, sensuous, 
mechanistic conception. It is Kant himself who 
perceived and wrote, seventeen years before the 
publication of the ;i Critique of Pure Reason," that 
"if the conception of substance is an abstracted 
conception, it is without doubt derived by ab- 
straction from material things" (see Werke, ed. by 
Hartenstein, 1867, vol. ii, pp. 294-5). And it is he, 
also, who will demonstrate for us anew, in the 
next chapters of the Critique itself, that in view of 
its demonstrable applicability to express, or to 
•enable us to t; think/' none but material, i.e. sensu'- 
ous, mechanical relations, the conception of sub- 
stance or thing is relative only, and not absolute. 
It is good only for the realm of phenomena, but 
cannot legitimately enter into any thought of ours, 
even though our thought be merely tentative, con- 
cerning the non-phenomenal or absolutely real. 

Kant argues, therefore, in disproof of the partici- 
pation of space and time in absolute reality, on the 
basis of a purely mechanical and materialistic con- 
ception of the nature of the absolutely real. He 
adopts this conception without criticism, hence purely 
dogmatically. He adopts it, further, in spite of the 
result of his own later critical examination of the 



74 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

conception, whereby the latter is shown to possess, 
itself, only phenomenal validity. In view of the 
nature of this result, therefore, it is obvious that the 
above-cited argument of Kant tends rather to raise 
a presumption that space and time participate in the 
nature of absolute reality, than that they are purely 
phenomenal and subjective. If the conception of 
substance or " subsistence " is applicable only to phe- 
nomenal — not to absolute — existence, and if th« 
relation of " inherence " is a purely phenomenal 
relation, then the proof that space and time neither 
fall under the mentioned conception nor exhibit the 
mentioned relation is surely no proof that they, too, 
are purely phenomenal! 

The true way to proceed in ontology, as in any 
other science, is, not dogmatically to presuppose or 
anticipate, but to await, the results of inquiry. 
Kant's primary inquiry in the Critique is ostensi- 
bly directed to the problem of knowledge. Until 
this problem is settled he has no right, in view of 
the relation between the sciences of knowledge and 
being, as indicated in our Introduction, to assume, 
as a basis of argument, a particular conception of 
being. He must wait and find out what conception 
of being the science of knowledge authorizes and 
enforces. By his pursuit of a contrary course he 
falls into — or, rather, he continues in — that snare of 
dogmatism and logical fallacv, which with his soul 
he professes to abhor and with his " criticism " he 
claims to have avoided. In this way he is prevented 
from reaping the full fruits of his own positive in- 



THE NON-CONTINGENT FORM OF SENSE. 75 

vestigations and discoveries, and the harvest is left 
to be gathered in by the leaders of a subsequent 
generation. But in this way, too, his work is 
marked at the outset as the reflex of an epoch of 
transition in thought — of transition which is only 
begun, but not as yet completed. 

Secondly. If, instead of arguing, with Kant, 
about the ontological nature of space and time on 
the basis of a preconceived and indefensible notion 
of the nature of absolute reality, we simply iook, as 
we must, at the positive facts respecting space and 
time, as forms of knowledge, which Kant " disco- 
vers " and declares, with a view to seeing to what 
notion of the nature of absolute reality they point, 
we shall find ourselves led directly away from the 
mechanistic and materialistic premises of Subjective 
Idealism. The positive substance of Kant's " disco- 
very " and doctrine respecting space and time, so 
far from supporting his assertion that they are 
merely "subjective," and so, in spite of all their 
demonstrated necessity and universality, still con- 
tingent (contingent, namely, on the wa}^ in which 
human, in distinction from any other possible, in- 
telligence happens to be constituted), tends directly 
to contradict it. It furnishes evidence, when con- 
sidered simply by itself and independently of any 
and all preconceived opinions, that the relation 
between subject and object is one of organic iden- 
tity, and not of mechanical separation and opposi- 
tion. And in this way it conducts, in its measure, 
to the conception of both subject and object as not 



76 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

shrouded in the dead stillness and mystery of 
purely sensible, material, " substantial " existence, 
or of so-called " things-in-themselves," but as in- 
stinct with a universal and all-illuminating spiri- 
tual life, and having in this life the essential root 
. of their being. 

Kant demonstrates, first, that time and space are 
ideal forms of knowledge or of sensible conscious- 
ness, and not what we, in our undisciplined thought, 
choose to call material substances or attributes of 
such substances. This their ideality is their reality. 
Secondly, he shows that time and space, as forms of 
knowledge, owe their existence to an activity of 
intelligence or mind. Indeed they exist only through 
such activity, and in no sense independently of it. 
Nevertheless this activity is, on the part of the indi- 
vidual subject, a " blind " or unconscious one. Man, 
knowing, sensitive, imaginative mind, the alleged 
subject-agent of this activity, works the miracle of 
time and space spontaneously, without conscious 
purpose and without knowledge, — the rather, as a 
pre-condition of the possibility of all his knowledge. 
Thirdly, Kant finds that the conditioning forms of 
our sensible knowledge are the conditioning forms of 
all objects of our sensible knowledge. All such ob- 
jects presuppose space and time. And not only so, 
but all such objects are really intelligible to us, as 
sensible objects, only by virtue of. or in and through, 
their time and space relations. Still further, it is 
only through our consciousness of objects in such 
relations that we become conscious of these " forms " 



THE NOX-COXTIXGEXT FORM OF SEXSE. 77 

— space and time — which we are taught to look 
upon as peculiarly our own. We find our objective 
consciousness, so far as it concerns space and time, 
to be self-consciousness, and our self-consciousness 
to be, in this respect, equally objective conscious- 
ness. 

Here, then, we find ourselves confronted with a 
state of things, the attempt to explain or judge of 
which in the light of purely mechanical or material- 
istic conceptions and relations can only result — as 
we may learn from Kant's example — in rendering 
them wholly unintelligible. Space and time, Kant 
finds, are. in effect, "'energies of mind." This is one 
point gained. They are. on our part, unconscious 
energies. This. too. is to be admitted. They are 
purely " subjective." Nonsequitur! This conclusion 
can only follow on condition that subject and object 
are mechanically separate and opposed to each other, 
so that what belongs to the one must eo ipso be ex- 
cluded from the other. But to view them thus is to 
prejudge the case, instead of waiting, as scientific 
honesty requires, to see whether such is the actual 
relation between subject and object, as disclosed by 
the facts of the case themselves. Xow the facts, as 
discovered by Kant, show that, so far at least as the 
forms of space and time are concerned, subject and 
object are of a common nature. The bond of their 
identity, further. — in this case, the forms of space 
and time, — is a living bond, for it is founded in 
an activity, an energy of mind, a spiritual function. 
The relation between them is therefore not the life- 



78 kant's critique of pure reason. „ 

less, abstract relation of mechanical separation and 
opposition, but rather the relation of organic one- 
ness. Each is distinguishable from the other, as 
particular from particular, but both are one in and 
through that which is universal about them, — 
namely, in the present case, the ideal forms or 
spiritual functions called space and time. Viewed 
in this light of evident fact, we can see how we, as 
individuals, should be unconscious of the activity 
whereby the forms of space and time are generated 
and maintained. For this activity does not belong 
to us as individuals, or particular 4i subjects." Nor 
does it belong to any one particular " object," or to 
all particular objects, as such. It is, in kind, as 
Kant finds, a spiritual activity, but it is also a uni- 
versal and for us a necessitated activity. Nothing 
remains, therefore, but to see in it the activity of 
universal Spirit, whose life and being at once trans- 
cend, and yet also include and reconcile, all particu- 
lar distinctions of subject and object.* 

Thus the positive substance of Kant's doctrine 
respecting space and time points, so far as it alone 
is concerned, toward a spiritualistic conception of 

*In the light of the facts which Kant discovers, when these are 
viewed simply by themselves and incj^endently of any mechanistic, or 
other, prepossessions, it were more natural to suppose space and time to 
result from a joint activity of subject and object, than to ascribe them 
to the subject alone. Such indeed is the first view which would suggest 
itself, and it is relatively correct. But in view of the particularity of 
both subject and object in our conscious sensible experience, and of 
the universality and necessity of space and time within such experi- 
ence, these l ' forms'* must be ascribed to the activity of a universal 
Spirit in which the empirical subject and object —each in its peculiar 
way — only dependently share. 



THE NON-CONTINGENT E01UI OF SENSE. 79 

the nature of absolute reality. It points to this 
conception by virtue of the organic and living 
nature of the relation between subject and object, 
which the doctrine, and the facts on which it rests, 
imply. In the same way it leads necessarily to the 
conception of the absolute nature of particular sub- 
ject and particular object as also spiritual. Each 
must be regarded as dependently sharing in an 
universal spiritual life and being, whereby each 
subsists and moves and has its own essential and 
characteristic being. 

In this way space and time appear as logically 
dependent functions of the absolute, but not as self- 
subsistent and pre-existent conditions thereof. They 
appear as such conditions, only when we arbitrarily 
regard the absolute materialistically as " substance. " 
But the conception of substance, as Kant will show 
us, is purely relative, and possesses only i; phenome- 
nal" validity. The Absolute can only be conceived 
as Spirit. 



CHAPTER III. 



THE UNDERSTANDING AS A NON-CONTINGENT 
FACULTY OF SENSIBLE KNOWLEDGE. 

KANT, it will be remembered, distinguished 
Sense and Understanding as complementary 
opposites. Through sense objects were declared to 
be given for knowledge and received ; through un- 
derstanding they became objects of thought or were 
definitively known. The necessary implication was 
that neither sense nor understanding, taken by 
itself, could be an effective factor in knowledge. 
Each required the cooperation of the other. 

The contrast of these two functions, and yet the 
absolute necessity of each to the effectiveness of the 
other, is strongly emphasized by Kant, at the begin- 
ning of the section of the Critique specially devoted 
to the examination of the Understanding. Sense 
and understanding, first, are contrasted. The former 
is a receptive faculty. It denotes a capacity of being 
affected or receiving ideas. It is a faculty of invol- 
untary perception. A process takes place, the initia- 
tion of which is not due to ourselves, who perceive. 
The movement is from without — from an assumed 
world of external objects, or, at all events, of reality 
mechanically independent of individual conscious- 

80 



UNDERSTANDING IN SENSE. 81 

ness, — into and upon such consciousness, or into 
and upon our " minds." Our own mental attitude 
is in this regard strictly passive. Understanding, 
on the contrary, denotes a process initiated within 
our minds and proceeding outward, so to speak, to 
meet the received impression and to take cognizance 
of it. It is a " spontaneous " faculty of thought. 
i; The understanding can perceive nothing, and the 
senses can think nothing.'" But, for this very rea- 
son, sense and understanding are necessary to each 
other. For it is only through the union of per- 
ception and thought that knowledge can arise. 
" Thoughts, without the content which perception 
supplies, are empty, and 'perceptions, separated from 
the conceptions which thought supplies, are blind.'' 
Or, as Kant puts the case in his "Anthropologic," the 
understanding without the senses is like a ruler 
without subjects; and — to complete the figure — 
the senses without the understanding are like a 
people living without rule in absolute, unintelligible 
confusion. 

In insisting thus anew upon the apparently un- 
qualified contrast between sense and understanding, 
Kant simply adopts an expedient for drawing the 
reader's attention away from the subject treated in 
the " Transcendental ^Esthetic," and enabling him 
to concentrate it exclusively upon the topic next to 
be taken up, namely, the understanding and the 
noncontingent or " formal " and a 'priori element in 
it. Just as, before, we were required to consider 
sense and its necessary forms, making complete ab- 
6 



82 KANT'S critique of pure reason. 

straction from the forms of intellectual conception, 
so now we are called upon to contemplate the latter 
to the exclusion of the former. 

But the reader will upon reflection readily per- 
ceive that this is only a device, and that the con- 
trast depicted is by no means so unqualified as to a 
casual and forgetful observer it might appear. The 
language, in which sense is here described, is com- 
pletely adapted to that conception of it, and indeed 
of all mind, which is current in purely sensational 
psychology. But we have seen — Kant has shown 
us — that this conception must be revised and cor- 
rected. Sense may be receptive, but it is not wholly 
contingent, nor is it wholly passive. Sense receives, 
but in receiving it does something. It not simply 
stretches out (so to express it) its two arms of space 
and time to take into its embrace whatever objects 
may fall into it, and to hold them there in undistin- 
guishable and unrecognized order. It puts — thus 
it appears to one who, like Kant, contemplates the 
subject from the point of view of purely individual 
consciousness — it puts upon those objects a nature 
which does not belong to them, namely, its own na- 
ture; it reduces them under relations which are 
necessarily involved in its own nature; it effect- 
ually moulds and shapes them, and that, too, as the 
only condition upon which they can be received by 
it or become objects of sensible consciousness at all. 
In other words, sense itself is not the mere accident 
of outward mechanical circumstance, nor like a 
mere " piece of white paper," to be written on, but 



UNDERSTANDING IN SENSE. 83 

a function of mind. Not only is it receptive; it is 
also, like the understanding, spontaneous and for- 
mative, and, like it, has its universal and necessary, 
or ideal, nature. Through this it establishes its de- 
scent from the same root as the understanding. 
This nature, indeed, turns out to be all that is strict- 
ly definable in or concerning sense, and it must not 
surprise us if we find (as we shall), in the discussion 
of the understanding, further evidence of its inti- 
mate organic oneness with the latter. 

The function of the understanding was stated by 
Kant to be Thought. The science of the laws of 
Thought is called Logic. Hence the name ;; Trans- 
cendental Logic " is appropriately given to that 
portion of Kant's inquiry which concerns those ele- 
ments, laws, forms, or principles of thought, which, 
pure from empirical admixture, are native to the 
understanding and inseparable from it, and hence 
reappear with determining, form-giving influence 
in all sense-conditioned knowledge. This inquiry, 
which occupies in the Critique vastly more space 
than was devoted to the " Transcendental ^Esthetic," 
is divided into two parts, the one concerned with 
the pure or a priori " Conceptions " of the under- 
standing, and the other with the " Principles '' of 
their application. Our concern in this and the next 
chapter is solely with the former. 

Sense was represented above as " receptive " or 
passive; understanding as "spontaneous" or active. 
In the former we were acted upon or affected, and 
the result was Perceptions. In the latter we were 



84 KANT'S critique of pure reason. 

active or (clumsily expressed) performed functions, 
and the result was Conceptions. Hence Kant's 
present averment, that " all perceptions, in view of 
their sensuous character, depend on affections, and 
all conceptions on functions. " A function is an 
action, and an action by which a definite work is 
performed. Thus the work of grasping objects is a 
function of the fingers. The understanding may be 
likened to the fingers of the mind, whereby many 
ideas are collected in one grasp, and so brought un- 
der a single and common idea or denomination. For 
the grasp (or "conception") of the understanding is 
itself an idea, and the work of the understanding 
is simply (in logical language) to subsume under 
its ideas — no matter whence or how these maybe 
obtained — the manifold ideas which are presented 
to it in consciousness, and so to reduce them to a 
kind of unity. Thus the understanding, provided 
with the conception of " body " or " material object, 1 ' 
and contemplating in consciousness the ideas of 
various metals, subsumes the latter under the for- 
mer, judging, and so affirming, that " every metal is 
a material object." This is a logical judgment, and so 
we may say that the function of the understanding is 
to judge, or, the understanding is the facult} r of judg- 
ment. This is what Kant means by " thinking." 

Now, the ideas or conceptions which the 'under- 
standing employs, or with which it grasps, may be 
either empirical and dependent on contingent sensu- 
ous consciousness, or original and native to the 
mind. Thus, the conception of " material object," 



UNDERSTANDING IN SENSE. 85 

above employed, is of the former nature. The con- 
ception itself is indeed not given through the senses 
or in simple sensuous consciousness, — it is not a 
conscious image or state, — but the understanding 
executes its function upon material thus contin- 
gently or empirically given, and only thus does it 
effectuate or frame for itself the conception in ques- 
tion. But, before the understanding could execute 
this, or any other function whatever, upon mate- 
rial thus supplied, there must have been something 
in its own nature which determined antecedently 
and conditioned the direction or kind of its own 
activity. If the understanding is anything, we 
can ascertain what it is only by examining the 
understanding itself, and not the material upon 
which it works. Furthermore, if the understand- 
ing is an activity, we can learn what is peculiar to 
itself, only by ascertaining what is characteristic or 
peculiar about the various forms of its activity. 
Now, all that is visible or discernible in the under- 
standing is its ideas. It " grasps' 1 with its ideas, 
its activity is an ideal one, and its original ideas are 
itself (as here considered). If, then, we can have 
before us a complete table of the various forms of 
the activity of the understanding in its peculiar 
work of judging, we may anticipate that the aspect 
or idea peculiar to each form will be an idea native 
to the understanding; there will be as many ideas 
of this kind as there are different forms of logical 
judgments, and no more, and these will be the pe- 
culiar object of our i; transcendental " inquiry. 



86 KANT'S critique of pure reason. 

Now, the logicians have concerned themselves to 
ascertain and classify the various possible forms of 
logical judgments. Kant, without further inquiry, 
accepts and adopts, with one or two minor modifica- 
tions, their work as correct and complete, and lays 
before his reader, accordingly, the following table 
of the different possible kinds or forms of logical 
judgments, reduced under four heads : 

Logical judgments are, as regards 

1. Quantity: 
Singular, 
Particular, or 
Universal ; 
2. Quality: 3. Relation: e 

Affirmative, Categorical, 

Negative, or Hypothetical, or 

Limitative ; Disjunctive ; 

4. Modality: 

Problematical, 
Assertory, or 
Apodictic. 
If we examine, now, each of these forms, we find 
involved in every one a peculiar idea, which is the 
characteristic thing about each form, is necessary to 
it, and may seem to define it. A "singular judg- 
ment, 11 in which the subject of discourse is a single 
object, involves obviously the special idea of oneness 
or unity; a " particular judgment, 11 relating to sev- 
eral objects, implies the idea of plurality, etc. The 
whole list of these ideas, then, will constitute the 



UNDERSTANDING IN SENSE. 87 

complete table of the " fundamental conceptions of 
the understanding. " regarded as the faculty which 
judges, or. as Kant also terms them, of " categories." 
The following is the complete 

TABLE OF CATEGORIES. 

1. Of Quantity: 

Unity, 
Plurality, 
Totality; 
2. Of Quality: 3. Of Relation: 

Reality, Substance and Accident, 

Negation, Cause and Effect, 

Limitation: Action and Reaction; 

4. Of Modality: 

Possibility — Impossibility, 
Existence — Non-Existence, 
Necessity — Contingence. 
These, then, are the fundamental, primary, or 
native conceptions of the understanding, which flow 
from, or constitute the mechanism of, its nature, are 
inseparable from its activity, and are hence, for hu- 
man thought, universal and necessary, or a priori. 
They are not contingent states or images of sensuous 
consciousness, and hence not to be thence derived. 
But they are not known to us independently of such 
consciousness or of sensible experience. On the one 
hand, they are exclusively involved in, and hence 
come to our knowledge exclusively through, the 
spontaneous activity of the understanding. But, on 
the other hand, the understanding is never active, 



88 kakt's critique of pure reason. 

until sensible data are furnished as material for it 
to act upon, and so it may truly be said that they 
become known to us " only on the occasion of 
sensible experience." 

These categories are "pure" conceptions of the 
understanding, inasmuch as they are independent of 
all that is contingent in sense. They are not derived 
from what is called the " matter " of sense, or from 
particular, variable sensations. But they are not 
independent of the universal and necessary form of 
sense. The reader must be expressly reminded that 
Kant, in the "Transcendental Logic," is professedly 
engaged with the search for an answer to the second 
main question of the Critique, How is pure physical 
science, or sensible knowledge, possible? Kant, now, 
has said, and, with reference to the kind of knowl- 
edge mentioned in the foregoing question, has said 
truly, that " thoughts, without the content which 
perception supplies, are empty." This is not less 
true of " pure " thoughts, than of any others. The 
content which the pure conceptions, as categories of 
pure physical science or sensible knowledge, cannot 
derive from the matter of sense, they must and do 
derive from its pure form. And in this relation 
between the pure conceptions of the understanding 
and their pure content there is involved, as we shall 
see, the most intimate community of nature and 
origin between sense, on its formal side (space and 
time), and the understanding itself. 

Let us consider the case more narrowly. We 
must keep in mind constantly our main question, 



UNDERSTANDING IN SENSE. 89 

11 How are synthetic judgments a priori possible'?" 
How is necessary and universal connection among 
" impressions'' possible? How is knowledge, or — 
which is the same thing — experience, possible? Em- 
pirical psychology, as represented by Hume, left us 
no answer to this question. 

Kant, it will be remembered, found the first part 
of the general answer to this question in the recog- 
nition of space and time as universal and necessary 
forms of sense. Now we must carefully resist any 
tendency on our part to give to the expression, 
"forms of sense," a materialistic interpretation. 
Sense is not a physical organ, nor a receptacle of 
any sort, in which space and time inhere as acci- 
dents, just as the color denominated red seems to 
inhere in or be a quality of the rose. Sense is first 
a function and then a consequent state of mind. It 
is just as ideal, and consequently non-material, as is 
knowledge, of which it is but an aspect or incident. 
Of the same nature are . a pace and time, and it was 
found that the very notion of them was a notion of 
synthetic wholes, or of wholes in which possible, 
ideally distinguishable parts w T ere united. Space 
was one grand whole and time was one grand 
whole; and the fact that they could not otherwise be 
conceived, and that in having the ideas of them we 
necessarily have, by implication, the ideas of the 
various geometrical and mechanical relations (di- 
mensions, motions) involved in them, was held to 
explain the possibility of apodictic mathematical 
knowledge. 



90 KANT^S critique of pure keasok. 

Now, space and time, like sense, of which they 
are said to be the forms, were separated from the 
understanding. On examination, also, it turned out 
that they were not the creatures of contingent 
sense, but rather its conditions, and so when they 
were called " forms of sense," the expression was 
simply a misnomer. They were forms supplied by 
mind, in order to make sense or sensible knowledge 
possible. They should therefore be termed, the 
rather, "forms for sense." But supposing that 
mind had supplied these forms, and nothing else, 
would it then have knoivledge of them and of those 
relations or qualifications of them which are the 
subject-matter of mathematical science? The an- 
swer must be that it would not, and that therefore 
Kant, in deducing from the forms of sense the possi- 
bility of mathematical science, presupposed, without 
mentioning it, the presence and activity of the un- 
derstanding. 

The understanding is, as Kant also declares, the 
peculiar faculty of knowledge. Knowledge implies 
the distinct recognition of the objects of knowledge. 
Each object must be distinguished from all others, 
and recognized in its peculiar nature as the one ob- 
ject which it is. And so Kant also speaks (sub- 
stantially) of the understanding as the faculty of 
unity, or the faculty whereby a mental object, whe- 
ther simple or complex, is for us one. So it was 
the understanding which really enabled us, in the 
" Transcendental ^Esthetic," to distinguish space and 
time from each other and to recognize and declare 



UNDERSTANDING IN SENSE. 91 

each to be the one real or potential whole that it is. 
Apart from this clear discrimination and recognition 
of them by the understanding or intellect, what 
were space and time, or, rather, what must they 
have been? Clearly nothing but abstractions, ob- 
scure and unperceived possessions or creations of 
our minds, of which we could neither know nor say 
anything. Kant nevertheless so considers them — 
namely, apart from understanding, and hence, since 
they have a mental origin and so must be ascribed 
to some faculty, attributes them to the imagination, 
" a blind, but indispensable function of the soul." 
The imagination, then, or the mind working spon- 
taneous]}' under the guise and name of imagination, 
blindly spreads out jthe synthetic mental wings of 
space and time, and understanding sees what it has 
done and clearly discriminates space and time, each 
as the one mental reality and whole that it is. The 
imagination, in like manner, blindly and confusedly 
provides for recognition by the understanding minor 
" syntheses " in space and time, which again the 
understanding clearly distinguishes and recognizes, 
each in its own peculiar nature. Thus the imagina- 
tion blindly creates that " synthesis " of lines in 
space, which is called a triangle. The understand- 
ing fixes the synthesis in one distinct and unalter- 
able conception. The conception of the triangle may 
thus be termed a ;i synthetic unity," determined or 
clearly defined by the understanding on the basis of 
material (lines in space) blindly brought together 
for it by the imagination. The imagination is thus 



92 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

the active mental principle and condition of percep- 
tion, whose results, as we have been rightly told 
above, are as " blind, " until the understanding has 
conceived them, as the conceptions of the under- 
standing are " empty," until provided with a per- 
ceptional content. Such content constitutes the 
definable meaning of every conception. The con- 
ception simply defines, or distinguishes, and so en- 
ables us to recognize, or knoiv, the content. 

Now, the pure conceptions of the understanding, 
or categories, are, as regards their " transcendental 
content, " or their necessary and universal and hence 
a priori significance, such " synthetic unities " as 
the triangle above considered, only of a more gen- 
eral and abstract order. They indicate those uni- 
versal forms or aspects of pure " imaginative " syn- 
thesis or relation in space and time, without which 
no synthesis and no judgment whatever are possible. 
Whatever syntheses imagination may present, all 
have the aspect of unity, plurality, or totality, of 
reality, negation, or limitation, etc., virtually inhe- 
rent in them. Understanding simply fixes these 
aspects in determinate conceptions; it distinctly re- 
cognizes, defines, and names them. And it fixes 
upon precisely these aspects, and no others, simply 
because the forms of its own peculiar activity as an 
universal faculty of judgment determine it to do so. 
These, then, are the aspects or ideas which were 
found in the beginning to be peculiar to, or in- 
volved in, the several forms of judgments as such. 
But a judgment is only an assertion of knowledge 



UNDERSTANDING IN SENSE. 93 

concerning some " object 1 '; or, at least, whatever we 
may profess to know concerning objects can be 
expressed only in the form of logical judgments. It 
follows, therefore, that the form of all our assertions 
about " objects " of knowledge, and consequently the 
form of our conceptions, or of what we call our 
knowledge, of objects themselves, is predetermined 
bv the categories, or, the categories " have an a 
priori reference to objects." 

The foregoing is the substance of what may be 
termed, in view of its correspondence with the simi- 
lar first portion of his treatment of space and time 
in the "^Esthetic, " Kant's "metaphysical exposition,' 1 
analysis, or deduction of the categories, as a prioi i 
notions of the understanding.* This is followed by 
a "transcendental deduction* 1 or demonstration of 
them, before proceeding to which one or two obser- 
vations are in place. 

First, it is extremely important for the student 
never to forget that the "table of categories 11 is set 
up by Kan* only as a table of the fundamental con- 
ceptions of physical science as such. Kant's present 
inquiry is simply, " How is pure physical science 
possible?" and he prosecutes this inquiry by seek- 
ing to determine what are the conceptions peculiar 
to physical science, what is their nature, and what 
their precise and specific significance. But physi- 
cal science exists primarily and characteristically in 

* In the u Transcendental Deduction," Kant himself, referring back 
to this portion of his discussion of the categories, speaks of it, for the 
first time, as a "Metaphysical Deduction" ; this title or description was 
not employed by him at all in the relevant place. 



94 kant's critique of pure reason. 

and through — or it is an analytic transcript of the 
content of — sensible consciousness, the latter being 
considered simply as the given product of two fac- 
tors, subject and object, acting only mechanically 
upon each other. Accordingly the "content" or 
meaning of each of the categories, as here contem- 
plated by Kant, is, as we have seen, and as further 
developments in coming chapters will more expli- 
citly show, purely and simply some mode or relation 
of space and time, and that, too, of space and time 
regarded quite independently of their demonstrable 
philosophic or spiritualistic significance, and as mere 
mechanical forms of the phenomena of sensible con- 
sciousness. Any richer content which any of these 
categories may have derived, for popular or philo- 
sophic consciousness, from sources of rational expe- 
rience which lie deeper than the mechanical forms 
of sensible consciousness, must be excluded from 
consideration, in regarding the categories as Kant 
here defines them. Thus, to mention only one ex- 
ample, if the word "causation" suggests something 
more than a mere irreversible relation of order in 
time between one phenomenon and another, if it 
thus implies purpose and efficient spiritual activity, 
this deeper and richer significance of the term, 
though elsewhere in this very Critique recognized 
by Kant as that which is "practically" known to 
constitute " true causality," must here be abstracted 
from, and the word must be restricted to express 
only the time-relation. The like is to be said with 
regard to the other categories. 



UNDERSTANDING IX SEXSE. 95 

The foregoing caution is doubly necessary since, 
on the one hand, the young philosophical student is 
often found resorting to Kant, and especially to the 
study of his exposition and deduction of the cate- 
gories, for light respecting the unqualified philoso- 
phic significance of the conceptions named in Kant's 
table; while, on the other hand, he is encouraged to 
do so by Kant himself, whose mechanistic prejudices 
lead him constantly to assume, dogmatically, that, 
with the determination of the exact significance of 
the categories as categories of purely physical or 
mechanico-sensible knowledge, their whole " theo- 
retical " significance is exhausted. The true nature 
of the discussion and of its limitation, is further ob- 
scured by the circumstance that Kant, while treat- 
ing of the categories of physical science, occasionally 
associates with them a meaning which is foreign to 
his own i; deduction " or account of them. Thus it 
occurs to him to speak, in passing, of an " influence " 
which the cause exerts in producing the effect. Xow. 
the notion of "influence" may and does indeed be- 
long to the completed conception of causation, as 
derived by philosophy from the examination of the 
whole nature of our conscious experience. But it is 
not included in the conception of causation, which is 
founded on the contemplation of the purely me- 
chanico-sensible aspect of our experience. It is not 
comprehended in the conception of causation as a 
''category" of "pure physical science." Here, as 
Kant himself has in substance already found, and 
will subsequently enable us more clearly to compre- 



96 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

hend, the term " causation " has to be restricted to 
denote nothing but a mode or relation of order in 
time, from which, as such, all notion of force or in- 
fluence is to be rigidly excluded. Such inadvertences, 
therefore, — if it is accurate so to term them, — on 
Kant's part, as the one just alluded to, are only con- 
fusing and misleading. 

Secondly, Kant's above-mentioned doctrine — we 
have termed it an " assumption " — that the cate- 
gories have no other valid use or significance than 
that which they possess as categories of pure physi- 
cal science, rests on a supposed demonstration that 
the understanding, considered universally, operates 
as a " theoretic " or strictly cognitive faculty only 
in, through, or upon the forms of space and time, as 
dead and abstract forms of mechanically given sen- 
sible " objects." Kant has, however, demonstrated, 
and will demonstrate, nothing of the sort. He has 
simply chosen to consider how the understanding 
operates when the conditions are purely mechanical 
and sensible, or viewed exclusively in their mechani- . 
cal and sensible aspect. The nature of the problem 
immediately in hand requires him indeed to do this. 
But the fact that this particular problem is and 
must be thus limited naturally proves nothing with 
respect to the existence of other problems. The 
mere fact that our conscious experience, or a part of 
it, has a mechanical and sensible aspect contains, 
surely, no proof that it has no other aspect. The 
fact that the understanding is seen to operate in a 
given restricted way, or that its conceptions are 



UNDERSTANDING IN SENSE. 97 

found to have a given restricted and abstract con- 
tent, when attention is directed to one of these as- 
pects (and that a relative and superficial one), has 
no power to prove that it will not be found exer- 
cising a more comprehensive function and that its 
conceptions will not acquire a richer and more con- 
crete content, when regarded in the light of other 
and more fundamental aspects of experience. But 
this is the only sort of i; proof" (?) which Kant fur- 
nishes. Nay, we shall find that what Kant dis- 
covers respecting the nature and operation of the 
understanding, as a faculty of sensible knowledge, 
really tends, like his discovery concerning space and 
time, to overthrow the limitations which he arbi- 
trarily seeks to place upon knowledge — and here, 
more especially, upon the significance and use of the 
" categories." It tends to show that the mechanical 
relation between subject and object implies the or- 
ganic one, that the materialistic conception of sub- 
ject and object (which is shown by Kant to be purely 
relative and phenomenal) implies the spiritualistic 
one, and that the categories of sensible or pheno- 
menal knowledge imply the categories of spiritual 
or real knowledge. And thus, again, Kant's work 
will show itself to be a " critical " one, as marking 
a crisis or turning-point in the progress of mod- 
ern thought, — a point of real, though uncompleted, 
transition from profitless and baseless negations to 
the recognition and demonstration of positive truth 
of living experience. For the present, the fore- 
going general reminder respecting the real nature 



98 kant's critique of pure reason. 

of Kant's work may suffice. Fuller illustration will 
follow in the next chapter. 

Finally, Kant himself calls attention to the cir- 
cumstance, that in the tabulation of the categories 
under four heads, there are three under each head. 
This circumstance, he declares, is a u challenge to 
reflection, inasmuch as it furnishes the only excep- 
tion to the rule that a priori logical division is 
dichotomous " (e.g. A and non-A; no third term). 
Further, " the third category of each class results 
from a combination of the first and second categories 
of the same claSs"; — not, however, from a merely 
mechanical combination, which would imply that 
the category was not a primary one, but derived 
from mere composition; but from a combination 
effectuated by a " special act of the understanding/' 
which adds to it a significance not contained in 
either or both of the categories combined in it. 

Kant, however, does not take up this " challenge," 
and the fact that he calls attention to these pecu- 
liarities in the table of categories, need only be 
mentioned for the sake of reminding the student of 
post-Kantian German philosophy, that here we have 
the first — at least superficial — suggestion of the 
form of that method which, partially developed and 
applied by Fichte and Schelling, attained with Hegel 
the rank of a universal method for philosophic 
thought. 



CHAPTER IV. 



THE "TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION" OF 
THE CATEGORIES. 

THE " transcendental exposition " of space and 
time, in the "^Esthetic " (pp. 64-66, above), con- 
sisted in showing how, on the supposition — and only 
on the supposition — that time and space were of the 
nature indicated in the " metaphysical exposition," 
pure mathematical science, with its universal and 
necessary propositions, was possible; and so answer 
was given to the first general inquiry raised by the 
Critique (see above, p. 52). 

The '■ transcendental deduction " of the categories 
consists, in like manner, in showing that on the sup- 
position — and only on the supposition — that the 
categories are such a priori, or universal and neces- 
sary, synthetic conceptions of the understanding as 
has been indicated in the last chapter, knowledge 
through sensible experience, or pure physical science, 
which is nothing but " determinate knowledge of 
phenomena in time and space," is possible; and so 
the second question of the Critique is answered. 

The question of fact has been settled. The cate- 
gories, as pure conceptions of the understanding 
which " borrow nothing from [contingent] experi- 
ence," have been demonstrated to exist as elements 

99 



100 kant's critique of pure reason. 

which enter, with form-determining influence, into 
the whole structure of our " experimental " (= here, 
sensible) knowledge. There remains only the ques- 
tion of right. By what right does the non-experi- 
mental mix with the experimental and constrain the 
latter to obey its laws? And the answer consists in 
showing that on no other conceivable condition than 
this can the " experimental " be in any way known, 
or — which amounts to the same thing — exist for 
us. The result is (as foreshadowed in our first 
chapter) that the psychological empiricist's concep- 
tion of experience and of experimental knowledge 
has to be radically revised and extended. 

In Chapter II we had to ask, What is that, com- 
mon to all sensible consciousness, and consequently 
to all " objects " revealed in sensible consciousness, 
by virtue and on account of which both it and they 
are all alike called sensible? And the answer was, 
Sensible consciousness and sensible objects are such 
by virtue of their all wearing, necessarily and uni- 
versally, a garment woven for them by "mind" out 
of relations of space and time, themselves its own 
" creation." 

But does sensible consciousness know itself and its 
objects simply in virtue of this ideal garment that 
it wears? No; for we have been seeing that "sensi- 
ble consciousness,'' qua sensible, is but the receptive 
condition of knowledge, and not knowledge, or intel- 
ligence, itself. Strictly speaking, sensible conscious- 
ness is an abstraction and a misnomer. Pure sensible 



THE "TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION."' 101 

j- nut sense, but self, or mind, or " understanding," 

that is conscious or knows in and by means, or on 
occasion, of what is called sensible consciousness. 
This is what has been incipiently, yet distinctly 
enough, implied in the result of the analysis of 
space and time. These are not "ideas'" received by 
us through sensation, but forms of perception, due 
to the productive activity of the imagination, which, 
as Kant perceives and declares, is a manifestation of 
one and the same spontaneous, mental, self -activity, 
which manifests itself otherwise in the "functions" 
of the understanding. But imagination and all its 
works are, as we have seen, blind and for us as good 
as nought, until distinguished by the understanding. 
It is the understanding, then, which makes sensible 
consciousness and sensible objects real for us; and 
understanding, as we are about to see, is nothing 
apart from the unity and identity of se£/-conscious- 
ness. There is no real consciousness, accordingly, 
which is not, or does not involve, self-consciousness, 
and no real "experience'' which is not, or does not 
essentially involve, self -experience. If, then, we now 
ask, "What is that, common to all sensible or experi- 
mental knowledge, by virtue and on account of which 
alone it is really knowledge for us? the answer is, 
that, since all such knowledge must take the form of 
distinct ideas or conceptions, and since no concep- 
tions are possible except in agreement with those 
master-forms, the " categories,*' which determine the 
nature and universal form of all our conceptions, 
therefore no experimental knowledge, no knowledge 



102 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASOST. 

of "objects/' no experience, is possible for us, ex- 
cept, as a predetermining condition, it be clad in the 
forms of the categories as pure conceptions of the 
understanding or of the self-centred, self-knowing, 
and spontaneously active human mind. Just, there- 
fore, as mind, working under the guise of imagina- 
tion, creates, in space and time, the fixed form and 
condition, or the only intelligible element of sense, 
so, working under the guise of understanding or 
intellect, it creates the like form and condition, or 
the truly and preeminently intelligible element in 
experimental knowledge — the element by virtue of 
which it is indeed, or is capable of becoming, knowl- 
edge. The understanding is thus the " author of 
experience" and of its objects, in any and every 
sense in which these latter are intelligible, or are 
real objects of conscious knowledge, for us. It is 
thus the author of "nature, regarded as the sum of 
all phenomena,'' and prescribes to it a priori its 
universal and necessary, if not its particular, laws: 
it prescribes to nature the laws, to which all its 
special laws must conform. 

In order, now, fully to understand Kant's " deduc- 
tion " of these truths, it is specially necessary to 
recall and to bear in mind just what sensible con- 
sciousness, taken purely by itself, as a series of 
passive states or impressions, is, and what are its 
limitations. The truth in regard to this matter 
Kant learned through Hume, and we are to consider 
Kant as having this constantly in mind as he pro- 
ceeds with his deduction. The relevant facts of the 



THE "TRANSCEXDEXTAL DEDtTCTKW.' 1 103 

case have been repeatedly alluded to in the fore- 
going pages (and the reader may compare, in par- 
ticular, pages 45-47). It is enough to repeat here, 
that the states or impressions, for the whole aggre- 
gate of which sensible consciousness is but the 
collective name, are, in Hume's phrase, so many 
atomically "distinct existences." and that, if these 
make up the whole of " mind/' knowledge is impos- 
sible. For (a) these impressions or states are passive 
and can do nothing; but knowing is an activity; 
(b) had they the power to know, each could know 
only itself, since each is distinct from and out of 
"real connection'' with the other; but (c) one im- 
pression — to say nothing of the other absurdities of 
the supposition — could not even know itself, for the 
reason that every original impression is atomically 
simple; it is not only out of relation to all other 
impressions, but is void of relation or distinction in 
itself; and where there is no distinction there is no 
knowledge. But now let us suppose that these im- 
pressions are not the whole of mind, but that there 
is, as Hume practically assumes, an indefinable 
mental power or, better, eye, to which impressions — 
otherwise called "objects' 1 — are simply presented 
for observation, and that all that this " eye " does is 
passively to view the impressions as, with " incon- 
ceivable rapidity," they pass before it. This "eye" 
or " mind " could still never be aware of more than 
one impression at a time, and each impression, as it 
came, would immediately vanish, leaving no trace 
behind it, and be followed by another quite " dis- 



104 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

tinct" from it. Still there would be no knowledge — 
not even a conscious ''picture'' or "image" of an 
"object." For to such an image a simultaneous 
combination of several simple impressions is neces- 
sary, and to such combination an active work of 
mind, called remembering, would be necessary, in 
order to keep the evanescent impressions from com- 
pletely vanishing, and so to hold them together in 
one embrace or view. But to suppose such a power 
and reality of active mind as memory, is to add 
something to the data of sensible consciousness, and 
the necessity of making this addition — which sensa- 
tional psychology always, but surreptitiously, makes, 
and which Hume thus made (cf. above, pp. 46-47) — 
is the first and simplest, and the universal historic 
proof that a purely sensational or " empirical" psy- 
chology and a purely sensational theory or explana- 
tion of knowledge are absolutely impossible. 

A summary name, therefore, for all that sense, 
considered on its material side, or sensuous con- 
sciousness, with its purely receptive nature, does not 
include, is combination or " synthesis." Sense fur- 
nishes a multiplicity of elements (" impressions "), 
for the material of knowledge, but these elements, 
as they are simply given and received, absolutely 
lack that connection which is, as matter of fact, 
necessary to render them really conscious objects of 
knowledge. This deficiency of sense is perceived 
and declared by Kant, who adds that of all our ideas, 
the idea of combination, union, or synthesis among 
the manifold elements of our sensible consciousness, 



THE "TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION." 105 

is the only one which is not and can never be im- 
mediately furnished us by such consciousness.* It 
"can never come into us through the senses" or be 
"given" us through impressions. Combination, re- 
lation, synthesis, is not a mere inert, finished, objec- 
tive, and observable " fact," impressed upon us from 
without through the action of ;i objects " upon our 
" minds," nor is it a " conscious state " induced upon 
us through the like agency. It is not a " fact," it is 
an act, a synthetic or combining or relationing act, 
accomplished by the spontaneous and independent 
activity of " the knowing subject itself." A line, for 
example, is a combination or " synthesis of manifold 
elements " or parts, which is not seen by the eye of 
the body or by the imaginary eye of sensuous con- 
sciousness, but only by the eye of the mind, which is 
the understanding. The line is not seen till it is 
thought, and " w T e cannot think it without drawing 
it, in thought." We can — to make this clear — 
and, from the abstract point of view of mere sensu- 
ous consciousness, w r e must, imagine the line as made 
up of an indefinite number of points joined to each 
other. For sense each of these points gives off its 
separate impression, and these are received, not sim- 
ultaneously, but in succession. Physically speaking, 
we cannot see all of the points together, we can only 

* What Kant more exactly m?ans is, of course, that the idea of 
combination includes all ideas not furnished by sense. The progress 
of the argument will show that it thus includes all ideas, or concep- 
tions proper, whatsoever, since there is no conception without com- 
bination. Sense, as here technically regarded by Kant, furnishes in 
fact no ' ; ideas " whatsoever, but only material for them. 



106 kant's critique of pure reason. 

see one at a time. There is and can be no purely 
physical or sensuous vision of the line. The physi- 
cal organ and its function are only the condition of 
vision, which is a synthetic act performed by the 
intellect, the mind's true eye. The intellect, namely, 
or " understanding," attends to the multitudinous 
impressions in their order and brings them to a 
stand, keeps them from fleeting, fixes them in the 
field of mental vision, which is memory, and so holds 
them together in a true synthesis or union, whereby 
the impression of their multitudinousness is lost in 
the clear and distinct thought of their unity, or of 
the one true object, which they conditionally com- 
pose. This thought, as such, is strictly the product 
of our thinking, or of the " spontaneity of our un- 
derstandings." The line is no object of thought or 
knowledge, until, by actively " drawing the line in 
thought," we really think and so know it. And the 
like is true for all sensible objects of knowledge. 
For in all of them there is involved a like combina- 
tion or synthesis of multitudinous parts or " impres- 
sions." 

But to say that all synthesis in sensible knowledge 
is the work of the understanding, is the same as to 
say that all distinction in knowledge and all unity 
are to be ascribed to the same active and efficient 
source. For synthesis is nothing but viewing that 
which is intrinsically, or at least sensibly, manifold 
as one. So Kant declares that " the conception of 
combination involves, in addition to the notion of 
multitudinous elements and their synthesis, the no- 



THE "TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION." 107 

tion of their unity. Combination may be abstractly 
defined as the idea of the synthetic unity of the 
manifold.'' 

Let it not, now, (a) be said or imagined, after 
the manner of the uncritical descriptive psycholo- 
gist, that this idea of complex unity is not original, 
but derived and transferred from an idea of simple 
unity, which is involved in the idea of a simple 
impression, and is conveyed, along with the im- 
pression, through the senses into the mind. For 
we have seen, abundantly, that there can be no 
such conveyance of the single, simple impression 
itself, nor, consequently, of the mathematical or 
numerical unity which alone belongs to it. On the 
contrary, the simple impression and its unity are, 
in the order of our knowledge or conception, late 
products of analytic abstraction. All sensible ob- 
jects of knowledge are synthetic wholes, and it is we 
who, having, by the very act and process of our 
knowing, made them such wholes, afterwards ana- 
lyze them into imaginary elementary units. Xor, 
on the other hand, (b) can the idea of this unity be 
logically or historically posterior to the idea of com- 
bination. On the contrary, as Kant declares, it is 
the very superinduction of this idea upon the multi- 
tudinous elements to be combined, which first makes 
combination possible; so that the idea of unity is 
logically prior to, or the condition of, the idea of 
combination. And, finally, (c) the unity in question 
is not identical with the mathematical " unity"* men- 
tioned in the table of categories. The latter unity 



108 kant's critique of pure reason. 

is essentially the same with that referred to under 
"(a)." It results from a " logical function," or pro- 
cess of thought, in which such combination of ideas 
is presupposed as, according to " (b)," must follow 
and depend on — not precede and condition — the 
" qualitative " unity under discussion. The origin 
of this unity must be sought, Kant declares, "in a 
higher region, namely, in that which itself first ren- 
ders the understanding, as a judging faculty, pos- 
sible, by rendering possible the union of different 
conceptions in one and the same judgment." The 
unity in question must transcend all other unities, 
and must be at once their universal condition and, 
as such, present and discoverable in or through 
them all. 

This unity is none other than the unity of pure 
self-consciousness. Wherever there is thinking, 
" having of ideas," or being conscious in any shape, 
there is a someivhat that thinks, has the ideas, or is 
conscious. This somewhat calls itself self, a self, 
one identical self, or person. It uses the pronoun of 
the first person and says: "J think, have ideas, or, 
am conscious," or, "All these thoughts and ideas are 
mine." Accordingly, Kant declares the condition of 
all thought and of all real or completed conscious- 
ness to be this, that it be either explicitly and actu- 
ally accompanied by the reflection expressed in the 
phrase, "I am thinking," or that it be possible for 
this reflection so to accompany it. I need not, of 
course, stop to reflect that all the thoughts, idea?, 
or " objects of consciousness," of which I am aware, 



THE "TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION." 109 

belong to me; but unless it were true that, if I did 
thus reflect, I should find that they were indeed 
thus all mine, they would have no existence for me; 
and, not existing for me, they would not exist at all. 
The one common aspect, then, that belongs so essen- 
tially to all thoughts or ideas, that without it there 
would be no thoughts or ideas at all, is this, that 
they all belong to a me — to a me whose nature is to 
be always one and the same, or identical. So that I 
may say that the "common expression*' for '"all my 
ideas" is, that "/am thinking." The consciousness 
thus expressed is pure self- consciousness. The unity 
involved in it may be termed the *' transcendental 
unity of self-consciousness," inasmuch as it condi- 
tions, and so explains, as we shall see, the possibility 
of certain forms of knowledge a priori. 

The unity of pure self-consciousness, it is seen, is 
present in and comprehends all other consciousness. 
It is the true and original unity, without which no 
other unity in knowledge is possible. It is the syn- 
thetic or comprehensive unity in which all other 
syntheses are strictly included, and on which they 
depend. Whatever may be necessary to this unity, 
or intrinsically involved in it, will bear a like rela- 
tion to all our knowledge whatsoever. 

Pure self-consciousness is distinguished from all 
other consciousness. The "I" who thinks, regards 
all his thoughts as belonging to him, but not identi- 
cal with him, as being his possessions, but not him- 
self. The expression, " I," denotes nothing which 
is sensibly perceived, no conscious image, like that 



110 K ant's critique of pure reason. 

of a tree, for example. It is not definable or de- 
scribable in terms of sensible consciousness. The 
idea is not received, and no object corresponding to 
it is presented. It can, therefore, originate only 
in the pure "spontaneity " of mind. It denotes a 
pure, ideal, strictly continuous, self-originating and 
self-illuminating act or activity, and not a "sub- 
stance," — in which latter case it would have to be 
sensibly perceived, presented in the forms of space 
and time, and exist before it was perceived. And 
the context shows that it is a synthetic activity, 
since it draws within its embrace all other activities 
and holds them together in one organic whole. 

On the other hand, and from another point of 
view, self-consciousness is identical with all con- 
sciousness. Whatever may be our thoughts or ideas, 
whatever our consciousness and its " objects, " the 
consciousness of " the identical self" is in them all 
and they are all in it. It permeates all other con- 
sciousness, and, by making the latter its own, at the 
same time makes it to be real consciousness. Thus 
pure self-consciousness gives itself a content, which 
it makes practically identical with itself, while it 
remains master of the content and so ideally distin- 
guishable from it. In short, consciousness in gen- 
eral and self-consciousness in particular reveal them- 
selves as organically one, separable only through 
abstraction, bound up in a living, actively synthetic 
and complex unity, of which the determining ele- 
ment or original unity (or, better, source and crea- 
tor of unity) is that universal "act of spontaneity" 



THE "TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION. " 111 

expressed in the phrase, "I am thinking. 91 Thus 

least in some sense, all ss is 

necessarily, or involves, self-consciousness, and the 
former cannot be conceived, even in abstract] 

- subject to the forms which the latter imposes. 

All combination of ideas or of their elemei; 
unities, in wholes, or in *' objects." is. then, a work 
of the understanding, and is consequently a 
or primarily and ideally independent of the ele- 
ments combined; and the understanding "is itself 
nothing but the faculty of" thus combining.'" The 
original and master combination, on which all other 
combination depends, is the union of all conscious- 

$s in the synthetic embrace, or "under the syn- 
thetic unity." of self-consciousness. "Thus the syn- 
thetic unity of self-consciousness is the highest point 
of all. on which all use of the understanding, even 
all logic, and. after it. all transcendental philosophy, 
must depend: nay. the faculty of such unity is the 
understanding itself." And the " highest principle 
in all human knowledge " is. that the manifold ele- 
ments presented in sensible consciousness must, in 
order to become elements of a real consciousness, be 
in relation to " the original synthetic unity of self- 
consciousness " and conformed to the conditions of 
the latter. 

Now let us look, by way of recapitulation, at the 
ground as it lies at present before us. The defi- 
ciency of sensible consciousness, conceived as inde- 
pendent of understanding and its activity, consis 
in the utter unrelation and absence of union among 



112 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASOX. 

its elements. Owing to this deficiency, sensible con- 
sciousness, as thus conceived, could not furnish, 
since, as such, it did not contain, any ideas of things 
or objects; for such ideas always consist of a defi- 
nite and orderly combination of elements. Still less 
could it furnish or account for our ideas of relations 
among different objects, or ideas of objects, such as 
causation, interaction, etc. Yet we have such ideas, 
of both kinds, or, what amounts to the same thing, 
we are aware of what we call objects as existing, 
and of fixed and even necessary relations as subsist- 
ing among them. Or, in other words, combination, 
both among the elements of our ideas, and among 
our ideas themselves, is a fact, and this combination 
exists in determinate forms, without which it would 
be indefinable and unrecognizable. Now, we have 
found an explaining source of apparent combination 
in the peculiar activity of the understanding, which 
is nothing but a pure, combining activity, effectu- 
ating a reduction of that which is per se chaotically 
multitudinous (namely, elementary sensuous " im- 
pressions ") under the synthetic unity of orderly 
wholes (ideas of objects and their relations), and, 
further — as a work absolutely essential to the com- 
pleteness and effectiveness of the foregoing — bring- 
ing all these wholes under the all-comprehending 
unity of one identical self-consciousness, which per- 
meates and dominates them all. So essential, in- 
deed, and so fundamental has this latter work ap- 
peared, that Ave have been enabled to recognize in it 
the characteristic nature, nay, the very essence, of 



THE " TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION." 113 

the understanding itself, and to perceive that, instead 
of the grand synthesis of self-consciousness being 
simply incidentally necessary to all other syntheses, 
all other syntheses were the rather but necessary 
and incidental parts of the synthesis of self-con- 
sciousness, and must accordingly adapt themselves to 
its requirements. 

On what condition, then, is sensible experience, 
and the knowledge, thus derived, of what we call 
nature, possible? Or, on what condition is " pure 
physical science *' possible? The condition is obvi- 
ously an important one, and has been plainly indi- 
cated in the foregoing. It is that our consciousness 
of nature be, at least in form, strictly a conscious- 
ness of self — a ^//-consciousness — or necessarily 
involved in and determined by that combining ac- 
tivity of the understanding, whose highest and ori- 
ginal, essential and universal, potency is manifested 
in the realization of self-consciousness. Would we 
know an object, it is not enough that we simply feel 
or have the impressions it produces. Indeed, simply 
to feel them is impossible. In order to know the 
object, w T e must also think it. But to think it is 
simply to combine the elements suited to compose it 
in the synthetic, conscious unity of an idea; and to 
do this implies the combination of this idea, with 
various others of similar nature, in the grander unity 
of one unbroken and uninterrupted consciousness; 
which latter, again, is impossible, except it be 
brought under the one central, unifying, and all- 
pervading light and activity of self-consciousness. 
8 



114 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

The activity, by which an object is thought, is part 
and parcel of the activity whereby consciousness is 
made and continues to be one; and the latter, again, 
is but part and parcel of the activity whereby self- 
consciousness constantly creates and sustains itself. 
Objective reality — or, that an object should be real 
for us, or really enter into our consciousness — 
depends on the i; union, in the notion corresponding 
to it, of the manifold elements contained in a given 
perception." This union is effectuated by the un- 
derstanding, and that only under, within, and by 
means of, the synthetic unity of self- consciousness. 
Consequently this unity is the determining source of 
all unity in objects as know r n by us, and so of the 
" objective validity," truth, or reality of all our ideas 
of objects. " The transcendental unity of self-con- 
sciousness is that unity through which all the mani- 
fold elements given in a perception are united so as 
to form the notion of an object. It is therefore to 
be called objective" — or, this unity is identical with 
the unity of consciousness, regarded as a conscious- 
ness of " objects." 

So, then, whatever a natural object definitely is 
for us, namely, its distinguishing form and relations, 
is determined, at least in its larger and vital linea- 
ments, by the nature of the combining activity of 
the understanding, as centring in, and radiating 
out from, self-consciousness. The very notion of 
" object" is a 'priori, created from within and not 
received from without, and whatever is essential to 
the notion of an object, as such, or of objects as exist- 



THE "TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION." 115 

ing in relations of coexistence and sequence, must, 
in like manner, be, on the one hand, a priori, and, on 
the other, enter into and form the condition of the 
very possibility of all our experimental knowledge, 
however otherwise determined. The " categories " 
express whatever is thus essential. 

Our ideas of natural objects are, considered with 
reference to their matter and not to their form, 
sensuous perceptions, containing multitudinous ele- 
mental impressions of phenomena in space and time. 
When the understanding combines them, it exercises 
what, logically described, is an act or function of 
judgment. Through this act it puts the perception 
in one of those determinate, but universal, synthetic 
forms, which it must assume, in order to become a 
part of real consciousness. These forms are, as we 
saw in the last chapter, nothing but forms of syn- 
theses, or combinations and relations, in space and 
time, wrought by the imagination under the deter- 
mining influence of the understanding. They are 
essential to the respective forms of logical judg- 
ments, in which they are employed, determining the 
characteristic nature of the latter, and alone ren- 
dering them possible. They are called categories, or 
pure and primary conceptions of the understanding. 
So. then, the elements of perception can be combined 
only by the understanding; the understanding can 
combine only by judging; and it can judge only 
through the use and application of the categories. 
Consequently, ,; all sensuous perceptions are subject 
to the categories, as conditions, under which alone 



116 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

their diverse elements can be united and enter into 
any consciousness whatever." 

The " transcendental deduction" is now completed. 
It is shown that, and how, sensible experience, or the 
foundation of pure physical science, which is the 
determinate knowledge of phenomena in space and 
time, is impossible, except through the categories as 
pure conceptions or functions of the understanding; 
and it is shown that, and how, these conceptions 
all depend on " the original synthetic unity of self- 
consciousness, which is the form that the understand- 
ing assumes in relation to space and time, as them- 
selves original forms of sensible consciousness." If 
we would know a sensible or physical object, it must 
first be clad in that form of thought which thought 
supplies, and without which it cannot enter into the 
presence-chamber of thought or be known. In other 
words, it must take the form of a substance. Only 
as a substance can it be conceived, and, on the other 
hand, it is only in consequence of our conceiving it, 
or operating upon it with the synthetic activity of 
the understanding, that it appears to us as a sub- 
stance. We do not perceive substances, we only 
conceive them; the notion of substance is not intro- 
duced into our minds through the senses. But it is 
a necessary and universal notion for sensible know- 
ledge, or physical science, and that because it is, in 
the way indicated in the transcendental deduction, 
a priori and an essential form of the activity of the 
understanding in creating sensible or " natural " 



TH1$ li TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION." 117 

objects of knowledge, out of the confused elements of 
sensuous consciousness. 

In like manner, the notion of a causal relation as 
existing between successive phenomena, or between 
successive aspects of the same phenomenon, is the 
result, not of our perception, but of our conception. 
Hume is right in saying that we never "perceive " 
any necessary, or any other real, connection be- 
tween phenomena or "objects." We do not and 
can not, as has been pointed out, even perceive the 
phenomena themselves, unless we also conceive them. 
And so the " causal connection " which we recognize 
between them, is but a form which they must neces- 
sarily assume in our conception and consequent 
knowledge of them. This relation of cause and 
effect, which is but a relation of necessary and irre- 
versible order in time, is necessarily conceived by 
us as universal, because the category of causation, 
as thus defined, is one of those a priori, mind-de- 
termined forms of our conception of sensible objects, 
which the latter must adopt, in order to be known 
at all. And the demonstration of the necessity and 
universality of this relation among phenomena is 
only tantamount to a demonstration, from a particu- 
lar point of view, that no knowledge of a universe 
of sensible objects in time is possible, unless the re- 
lation among these objects be one of determinable 
" law " or order. 

Thus it is that, in Kant's language, it is our gen- 
eral conceptions of objects which render objects, as 
such, possible for us, and not objects which render 



118 k ant's critique of pure reason. 

these conceptions possible. And thus, too, it is we 
who, incapable, through sensuous consciousness, — 
the only way in which " nature " is here held to 
affect us or communicate herself to us, — of reaching 
nature herself and deciphering any laws which may 
belong to nature as a complex of " things-in-them- 
selves," " prescribe laws to nature a priori" compel- 
ling her. in our knowledge of her, to conform herself 
to them, and not allowing her to dictate them to us. 
Indeed, the notion of nature itself is a priori; it is 
our notion, our creation; and the categories, which 
determine the form of the universal laws of nature, 
are but the constituent elements of this mind-created 
notion itself. 

Should this result still seem incredible and enig- 
matic to the reader, Kant replies by reminding him 
anew of that commonplace of sensational psychology 
which the Transcendental ^Esthetic has reaffirmed, 
namely, that all our knowledge of sensible nature 
is, after all, only a knowledge, not of things as they 
are or may be in themselves, but of things as they 
appear in our ideas of them, i.e. of phenomena. It 
is no more difficult, he declares, to understand how 
the laws of phenomena (thus understood) in nature 
should agree with the a priori combinatory forms of 
the understanding, than how phenomena themselves 
should agree with the a priori forms of sensible per- 
ception. "Laws do not exist in phenomena; they 
only exist relatively to the understanding mind or 
subject, in which the phenomena inhere; just as, 
also, phenomena themselves have no independent 



THE " TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION." 119 

existence, but exist only relatively to a being en- 
dowed with senses through which he may be affected. 
If things in themselves have laws, these laws no 
doubt belong to them necessarily and inherently, 
and without reference to any understanding that 
may know them. But phenomena are only ideas of 
things, of which latter it is impossible for us to say 
what they may be in themselves. But, as mere 
ideas, they are subject to no law of combination 
whatever, except that which the combining faculty 
prescribes for them." Then follows a very brief 
recapitulation of the points involved in the general 
argument of this chapter, from which it results that 
" all phenomena of what we call ' nature ' are, with 
respect to their combinations and relations, under 
the law of the categories, which is the original source 
of necessary law in nature — if we consider nature, 
not in her more particular and accidental, but in her 
universal lineaments. * * * Particular laws, 
which relate to the contingent, and not to the uni- 
versal, qualifications of phenomena, can, for this 
very reason, not be completely deduced from the 
laws of the categories, although they must all be in 
conformity with the latter. To become informed 
respecting them we must have particular experience 
of them : but as to what experience, as such, or 
viewed in its essential and universal character, is. 
and as to what must be the universal nature of any 
object in order that it may be known through expe- 
rience, the laws of the categories, and these laws 
alone, give us a priori information." 



120 kant's critique of pure reason. 

The general result of the " transcendental deduc- 
tion " is summed up by Kant as follows: 

" We cannot think an object, except through cate- 
gories; we cannot know the object of our thought, 
except through perceptions, w T hich conform to the 
categories. Now, all our perceptions are sensuous 
and all our knowledge, relating, as it therefore 
does, to objects which, on their particular, sensuous 
side, we do not create, is empirical. But empirical 
knowledge is experience. Hence no a priori knowl- 
edge is possible for us, except in relation to objects 
of possible sensible experience." 

The transcendental deduction of the categories, as 
it now lies complete before us, contains a notable 
contribution to the science of knowledge, and so, 
indirectly, to the science of being. It is neverthe- 
less marred and covered with a needless air of para- 
dox, owing to the peculiar and altogether dogmatic 
limitations, which w T e have previously recognized as 
belonging to Kant's purely mechanistic point of view r , 
and which react with absolutely disfiguring and 
confusing influence upon his own interpretation of 
the facts demonstrated by him. Hegel, who is Kant's 
best critic and interpreter, remarks repeatedly that 
the whole nature of the Kantian philosophy is deter- 
mined by the circumstance that its author always 
ends by contemplating his subject purely from the 
point of view of " consciousness," as distinguished 
from "self-consciousness.' 1 This is only another w T ay 
of saying that Kant persists in considering the pro- 
cess of knowledge, or, more particularly, the rela- 



THE u TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUC'TIGX.'' 121 

tion between subject and object, in its superficial, 
mechanical aspect, rather than in its essential and 
organic one. The former is viewed bv him as funda- 
mental, and determines the character of his final 
conclusions. 

" Consciousness," as distinguished from ; * self-con- 
sciousness," is what we have termed " sensible con- 
sciousness." It is consciousness as considered in 
empirical psychology — a fixed and finished product, 
a complex series of " states" or " feelings, M a sum of 
"mental phenomena" which we find already exist- 
ing, and which, prior to exact investigation, are 
roughly imagined to be the purely mechanical result 
of the action, upon one indefinable mental ,; sub- 
ject, '' of "objects" whose nature is wholly foreign 
to the subject. This is the first appearance, and it 
is an appearance which has its relative justification. 

Self-consciousness, on the other hand, is not a 
mere product: it is a process. It is a complex and 
organic activity, and reveals a nature of subject and 
object, and of the universe of experimental reality, 
in which both subject and object are but dependent 
terms, quite different from the one suggested by the 
mere analytic contemplation of sensible conscious- 
ness. The scientific examination and explication of 
self-consciousness were carried further in post-Kan- 
tian philosophy. But Kant carries the inquiry far 
enough to show to one, who regards the facts with- 
out prejudging them, that in self-consciousness there 
is revealed living, spiritual, effective, and determin- 
ing — though not, indeed, materialistically "sub- 



122 rant's critique of puke reason. 

stantial " — reality. And, in particular, Kant sig- 
nally demonstrates that self-consciousness, with its 
pure, spiritual, organic activities, is the creative 
condition of sensible consciousness. He shows that 
no sensible consciousness, no consciousness of sen- 
sible objects, is possible, unless it be thoroughly per- 
meated, moulded, and sustained by a self-conscious 
activity of mind, which creates for it its universal 
forms and, through these, conditions all its particu- 
lar ones. Nevertheless, his narrow and prejudiced 
point of view leads him to give to the facts demon- 
strated by him an interpretation whereby they are 
rendered not only paradoxical in appearance, but 
wholly unintelligible. Self-consciousness he inter- 
prets (?) as nothing but a "formal" or "logical" 
aspect or condition of sensible consciousness. For 
him the conditioned product is the main thing. The 
conditioning process and agency is merely an onto- 
logically insignificant incident of the former. This 
is wholly unintelligible and is in direct contradiction 
of the facts which Kant discovers and declares. 
Kant finds and declares the self-conscious activity, 
which conditions sensible consciousness, to be a 
" pure activity," a " pure spontaneity" of mind; it 
is livingly efficient, synthetic, organizing. It does 
something. It is the condition of all conscious doing 
and being. To assert, then, that it is after all only 
formal and logical and is per se only an insubstan- 
tial incident of sensible consciousness, or of the 
dependent product of its activity, is to use words 
which not only contradict the facts, as he finds and 



THE "TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION." 123 

asserts them, but are devoid of meaning. As well 
might you say that the organizing forces which 
build up the tree are only ,: incidental " or only 
" logically " necessary to the tree regarded as a com- 
pleted product, a mere mass of potential timber. 
Of course you have a right to use such language, if 
you have special occasion to fix exclusive attention 
upon the tree in its finished form, but you can only 
use it metaphorically or with a reservation. And 
so Kant, in view of the fact that he is here specifi- 
cally employed with the task of ascertaining and 
describing the conditions and nature of sensible con- 
sciousness only, might justly speak of self-conscious- 
ness, in its logical relation to sensible consciousness. 
as merely a formal aspect or incident of the latter, 
but only on condition that he made it understood 
that his words were to be taken with a qualifica- 
tion, or as not expressing all that self-consciousness 
per se is demonstrated by the facts to be. But this 
is not Kant's way. So thoroughly is he mastered 
by the dogmatic persuasion that sensible conscious- 
ness is the alpha and omega of knowledge, that it 
is in sober earnest that he declares self-conscious- 
ness, so far as we can really know it, to be a mere 
shadow cast by us as purely individual human think- 
ers, or by the human race as an aggregate of such 
thinkers. It is not an object of real knowledge, it 
is not revelatory of real being, simply because, in- 
stead of being a part of sensible consciousness, it 
is its transcendent (and self-manifesting) condition. 
Kant, accordincrlv. continuing to look at his whole 



124 KANT'S critique of pure reason. 

subject exclusively from the point of view of sen- 
sible consciousness and of the corresponding me- 
chanical conception of the nature and relation of 
subject and object, ascribes self-conscious mind with 
all its' works simply to us as phenomenal individual 
subjects, or to the human race as an aggregate of 
such subjects. Knowledge, and the activities from 
which it proceeds, is wholly " within," it is in**us as 
thinking individuals, and nothing intelligible comes 
to us " from without." And all this because the 
mechanistic prejudice requires subject and object 
to have nothing in common, and will not permit the 
subject, even, to know himself in his true reality, 
whereby he participates in the universal, and 
through it in the nature of his particular objects, 
but only the phenomenon of himself. (We must 
never forget this point, namely, that, according to 
Kant, it is never the absolute subject that knows, or 
that can detect and know himself in the act of know- 
ing, but only the phenomenal subject — a meaning- 
less distinction, whereby the mystery — and non- 
sense! — of the whole situation, as viewed by Kant, 
is immeasurably increased.) 

Perhaps we can best illustrate the absurdity of 
Kant's dogmatic interpretations and the deeper truth 
to which the facts discovered by him really point, in 
some such way as follows: — 

Suppose, for example, the hand in a human body 
endowed with a particular, sensible consciousness of 
its own, so that it might "receive" into itself the 
mental impression or image of any other particular 



THE " TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION." 125 

part of the body, such as the head. The hand would 
be the " subject," the head the ;i object," of conscious- 
ness. The hand would view the impression of the 
object " within " itself, and, shaking its own imagi- 
nary head, would say, wisely, in the spirit of the 
sceptical (or even of the "critical"!) Idealist, "Ah, 
here is an impression of what I call a head, which 
doubtless denotes what I may term a head-in-itself. 
But this impression in my manual consciousness I 
perceive to be wholly determined in form by the 
nature of my consciousness, and the impression it- 
self is nothing but a modification of myself, and so 
only shows me how I may be modified or 4 affected/ 
but not what is the essential nature of that head-in- 
itself which causes the affection. Plainly, the head- 
in-itself possesses a wonderful and inscrutable na- 
ture. In it is lodged true reality, and it, whatever 
it may be, and although it is forever unknowable to 
me, must doubtless furnish the type of such reality, 
w r hile I am nothing but a fragile mirror; or, rather, 
I cannot distinguish myself — apart from the wholly 
insubstantial hand- form which determines and per- 
verts the form of my consciousness — as being any- 
thing in particular other than the images of true, 
but alas! unknowable, objects, which are reflected in 
me." Should we, from our larger point of view, 
call these oracular utterances of " the hand " wis- 
dom? Should we not, the rather, term them piti- 
able nonsense? And should we not be constrained 
to say to the hand, " hand, the hard and fast oppo- 
sition which thou, as conscious subject, pretendest to 



126 kant's critique of pure reason. 

find existing between thyself and that nominal ob- 
ject of thy consciousness, which thou termest the 
head-in-itself, so that the true knowledge of the lat- 
ter can never enter thy poor consciousness, is wholly 
an affair of thy own creation ; and thy show of 
meekness, in reducing thyself to the quality of a 
mere shadow and exalting the ' unknown ' object 
and subject of thy consciousness to the position of 
sole occupants of the throne of being or sole pos- 
sessors of absolute reality, is wholly uncalled for, 
and hence ridiculous. Thou beginnest by wilfully 
cutting thyself off, in imagination, from all relation 
to aught but thyself. Thou arbitrarily viewest thy- 
self as one distinct and independent thing, self, or 
subject of consciousness, complete in thyself, a wholly 
individual and self-included entity, atomically sepa- 
rate from all other existences, and not needing them 
in order to thine own existence. Upon this suppo- 
sition, any impressions which other existences may 
make upon thee must necessarily appear mechanical 
and inscrutable. Thou, as individual, canst not go 
out of thyself to see whence they come and know 
what reality lies back of them. On reflection, thou 
findest also that all thou knowest or canst know of 
thyself, in the way in which thou hast determined 
to look upon thyself, is confined to the consciousness 
thou hast of the affections or impressions produced 
in thee by objects other than thyself. It is no won- 
der, therefore, that in place of thy original suppo- 
sition of thyself as something, thou art now led to 
regard thyself or thy consciousness as but the in- 



THE "TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION."' 127 

substantial and inexplicable shadow of other things, 
which mast lie forever hidden from thy view. But 
all this helplessness of knowledge, this conversion of 
knowledge into ignorance, results only from the cir- 
cumstance that thou hast arbitrarily chosen to con- 
sider the case from the lowest and narrowest, and 
not from the highest and most commanding, point 
of view within thy reach. I, who occupy this latter 
point of view, perceive that thou art not a distinct 
and independent individual, complete in thyself, nor 
is thy consciousness a mere shadow. In like man- 
ner. I see that the head, the object of thy conscious- 
ness, is not simply a distinct and independent thing 
in and by itself. Both thou and it may indeed be 
thus regarded, but. when thus regarded, each is 
viewed only in a light which is partial and incom- 
plete, and hence may and does mislead. Thou, 
hand, and thy fancied distinct object, the head, are 
both inseparably bound together as coordinate mem- 
bers of a complex, but organic and ' synthetic,' unity 
or whole, namely, the human body. In this whole, 
thou and all other members are so intimately and 
vitally united, that the complete separation of any 
one of you from the rest would involve the complete 
and immediate extinction of your true, real, and cha- 
racteristic nature or beino-. The whole necessarilv 
implies each one of you, and each of you neces- 
sarily implies the whole; while all of you, through 
your relation to the whole, are necessarily related to 
and imply each other. Since, therefore, to the true 
existence and function of each one of you. the whole, 



128 K A NT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

to which you belong, and all its other members are 
necessary, no one of you, in your purely individual 
and separate aspect, can claim to be a true and com- 
pleted and independent self or entity. On the con- 
trary, you are each an individual self, or your dis- 
tinct and separate natures are what they are, only by 
virtue of the inclusion and participation of each and 
all of you in a universal self or idea, the self or idea 
of the whole body. The universal ' self (the idea of 
the whole body) is the key to unlock the myster. 
of your particular selves. It is in this sense your 
self, and you are its,' and all you different members 
strictly belong to and are a part of each other. Thus,, 
hand, thou seest that the idea of the head — -the 
special object of thy present consciousness — is but a 
part of the completed idea of thine own self, since 
thou canst not adequately think of thyself except as 
involving the head and all other members of the one 
body, to w r hich you all belong, as essential to thine 
own completeness. You all are in one, and one idea, 
one life, one indiscerptible power and light of soul is 
in all of you. Thou w 7 ilt see, therefore, that thou 
art what thou art, not solely, nor principally, by that 
which makes thee numerically distinct from the head 
and the rest of the body, but by virtue of thy par- 
ticipating in and having as thine own a universal 
life, an ideal quality, a spiritual force, which is pres- 
ent in every member. Thus, so far as thou and thy 
object are concerned, 'existence 1 is obviously not 
atomic, individualistic, separated off by impassable 
gulfs into wholly unrelated and unlike realms. And 



THE " TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION." 129 

so, if thou, my friend, wilt cease to fix thy stupid, 
staring gaze exclusively upon thine own individual 
impressions, and wilt rise to such a completed and 
universal self-consciousness as thou may est easily at- 
tain, thou wilt see that that previously inscrutable 
object, the head, is indeed thy twin-brother, thine 
alter ego, or, better, a true and complementary part 
of thyself,' and no more mysterious than thou thy- 
self art. Moreover, this sense- begotten mystery, 
'hich has shrouded for thee thy own existence, will 
lisappear. Thou seest, indeed, already that thou 
?xistest only through, by, and for, an idea, a use, 
a purpose, which is but an integral part of a larger 
idea. This idea does not exist as an .inert, lonely, 
sensible object, but as a spiritual force, all-compre- 
hensive, all-permeating, and all-sustaining within its 
range. Through thy participation in and identifica- 
tion with it, and through this alone, thou seest how 
thou art able to go out of thy separate individual 
sphere, as a mere hand, and to know the head and 
all the other members of the body as a part of thy 
larger and completer self. And thou must now see 
that it is primarily in this ideal force, this effective 
power of ■" spirit" — which is not inscrutable, but 
self-revealing and translucent as the light of day — 
that true being and reality for thee reside. In this 
reality, as thou perceivest, both thou and thine ; ob- 
ject • ' alike participate. Through it you both exist 
and are what you are. The talk of a head-in-itself, 
as a separate and independent entity, was therefore 
nonsense, and the impressions, which led thee to 



130 Kent's critique of pure reason. 

postulate its existence, were nothing but the form 
of thy knowledge of the head, considered on what 
we now perceive to be its relatively unreal side, 
namely, the side of its apparent, but in fact unreal 
and impossible, independence and distinction from 
the knowing ' hand/ Thus thy ; impressions ' or sen- 
suous perceptions pointed to that which is accidental, 
rather than truly substantial, or independently and 
abidingly real, or to that which is unknowable be- 
cause it is, absolutely and independently considered, 
non-existent, and not because it is transcendently ex- 
alted above or removed beyond the reach of ' knowl- 
edge.' " 

It is in a strain similar to the foregoing that we 
must address Kant, when he treats the limitations 
of sensible consciousness and of physical science, 
which is but the accurate deciphering of the letters- 
and syllables of such consciousness, as universal 
limitations of all " theoretical " or real knowledge. 
Individual, sensible consciousness, which is a pano- 
rama of so-called impressions, or " internal " states 
of appearance, is, as Kant himself has shown us, 
absolutely dependent on individual self-conscious- 
ness, which is a purely ideal, but none the less real 
and synthetic, or combining, activity. But even this 
larger interpretation of consciousness, true and su- 
premely significant as far as it goes, falls short of 
the true and complete interpretation. Individual 
or unipersonal self-consciousness reveals itself as not 
merely numericall\< one and self-identical, but as 
the one which pervades the many, the individual 



THE "TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION." 131 

which is one with the universal, and which makes 
or has the many and the universal as an organic 
part of the consciousness of itself. The self-con- 
sciousness of the individual thus leads him directly 
away from the mere consciousness of himself as 
purely individual, and sets him down in a land in 
which he at first appears to himself as a stranger, 
but where he quickly realizes that he is at home. 
This land is ft is land; it is the land of his larger 
self, or of his self on the side of its universality, or 
of its relation to universal and absolute being. It 
is the land of universal Self, Reason, or Spirit. It 
is, I say, his own land, it belongs to him, just as, 
in our illustration above, the whole idea or "land" 
of the body belonged to and ^was involved in the 
completed consciousness of the hand. Individual 
self-consciousness thus finds that in that synthetic, 
combining, universalizing activity whereby alone it 
grasps objects, it is throwing about them simply the 
threads of that larger Self, in which both itself and 
they are included — the self which lives in them, 
as they too all " live and move and have their being" 
only in it. This larger self is divine: it is universal 
living, effective reason, it is absolute Spirit. The in- 
dividual's sufficiency " to think anything of himself" 
is, thus, "of God." It comes from his participation 
in a light which can be. in its completeness, no less 
all-embracing and all-creative than divine reason. 

In this view all reality or absolute " being " is 
living and spiritual, not dead and merely " sub- 
stantial." The appearance of the contrary is mere 



132 kant's critique of pure reason. 

appearance, which is possible, as such, only for a 
consciousness which is naturally restricted, or volun- 
tarily restricts itself, to the purely individualistic 
point of view of t; sensible " consciousness. Every 
particular, finite self is at once a self-realizing, and 
yet also a dependent intelligence, its individual pecu- 
liarities resulting only from its special place or func- 
tion in the universal realm of spiritual power and 
reality, of which God is the independent and trans- 
cendent, yet omnipresent and all-sustaining, monarch. 
All of its " objects " are manifestations or " phenome- 
na 1 ' of what must in the last resort be regarded as 
similar " energies of mind,' 7 of lower or higher degree. 

In this view, too, the absolute distinction, which 
exists for Kant between subjective and objective, as 
also between a priori and a posteriori, falls away. 
The subjective and objective are organically one. 
The same ideal life and power are in and constitute 
them both. The " forms of thought 1 ' are not Simply 
our forms, having no ontological significance and 
serving merely to bind sensuous perceptions to- 
gether in " objects" for our convenience. They are 
the true life and reality of the objects, as w T ell as of 
ourselves. We and they are organically one in that 
Logos, or expressed power of divine spirit, which is 
not only "above all," but also " in and through all," 
and without which nothing was or is " made." 

" To this complexion " the collective body of Kant's 
three Critiques, as a whole, effectively point, but, at 
most, only " practically" come. And, more especially, 
it is to such a science of knowledge and of being 



THE "TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION." 133 

as is roughly indicated in the foregoing pages, that 
the facts respecting the real process of knowledge 
and the actual relation between subject and object 
in knowledge, as discovered and set forth by Kant 
in his Transcendental ^Esthetic and Analytic di- 
rectly lead. Such a science is immediately founded 
in and corresponds to experience, to our whole expe- 
rience, and not simply, like the theories of sceptical 
idealism and agnosticism, to one superficial part or 
aspect of experience. It is in such a science that 
philosophy, in its grander historic forms — the forms 
which contain a positive, experimentally demonstra- 
ble substance, and are not filled with dogmatisms 
and arbitrary negations — has consisted and ever 
consists. And it was necessary to indicate here, at 
least to the foregoing extent, the outlines of this 
science, in order that we might, on the one hand, 
see what is the general relation of the facts dis- 
covered by Kant to the cardinal principles of philo- 
sophic truth, and. on the other, perceive yet more 
clearly than before, that the limitations which Kant, 
in the Transcendental Deduction, and in his whole 
Critique, places on all ''theoretical" knowledge, are 
dogmatically asserted, and hence to be looked upon 
with absolute distrust. When therefore, for exam- 
ple, we find Kant declaring that the " identical self," 
the "I," which asserts itself in the activity of self- 
consciousness, knows not what itself is, but only that 
it is, — and this, too, simply because, of that which is 
expressed by the pronoun " I," we have, and from 
the nature of the case can have, no sensible impres- 



134 kant's critique of puke REASOX. 

sion, perception, or image; when be says that we 
can " think," but not " know,'' ourselves, and implies 
that effective reality or true being belongs only to 
unknowable things which appear, and yet do not 
appear, in those sensible perceptions which we call 
phenomena; — when he says all this, we shall, let it 
now be hoped, be able to take his utterances at their 
true worth — or worthlessness. We shall decline to 
adopt as solemn truth the mere prejudices of that 
phantom which imagines and terms itself purely 
and merely individual sensible consciousness. 

And, finally, we shall see that the extension of the 
aforesaid "limitations'' to the whole field of knowl- 
edge, is irrelevant to the immediate subject of dis- 
cussion. The question was, How is pure physical 
science, or sensible knowledge of objects, possible? 
And the answer was, substantially, Such knowledge 
is not possible without fixed and definite conceptions 
and invariable relations or " laws," which can be 
immediately traced to no other source than the syn- 
thetic activity of self-conscious mind. From this 
source is derived the universal and necessary form 
of sensible knowledge. Its material, on the other 
hand, must all be given in the shape of conscious 
perceptions, appearances, or phenomena. These, on 
the one hand, must be given; and, on the other, 
beyond them physical science, through its necessary 
organ, sensible consciousness, cannot go. Thus the 
question is answered. To go further, and assert that 
all knowledge is strictly confined to the same condi- 
tions, is, compared with the requirements of the 






T1IK "TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION." 135 

discussion, simply a work of supererogation. Still, 
this might be endured, were the assertion proven. 
Xot being proven, nor supported by even a shadow 
of proof, it is a source of double confusion. It 
diverts attention from the immediate problem in 
hand, and lands it in a bog of sophistry. 

We may recognize, however, with gratitude, and 
study with profit, the positive work which Kant has 
accomplished. He has, in principle, already deter- 
mined the nature, conditions and limitations of 
" pure physical science " or sensible knowledge. He 
has also shown that the knowledge of the human 
spirit is not to be compassed by the methods of 
such science or by any mere analysis^ accomplished 
through empirical psychology. And by showing 
that knowledge, even upon its lowest, sensible terms, 
implies a combining and illuminating activity of 
mind, he has done the work of a hero in undermin- 
ing sensational psychology and, even, the dogmatic 
metaphysics, which rests on it, and in which, also, 
Kant himself continues, in too great a measure, 
complacently to rest; he is really, however uncon- 
sciously, pointing all the while in a way which is 
most significant for the thoughtfully observant mind, 
to the philosophic conception of being, as ideal, uni- 
versal, spiritual, and self-knowing power, and not 
merely atomic, impenetrable, and unknowable " sub- 
stance." * Whither Kant thus pointed, his successors 
did their best — and that was not a little ! — to fol- 
low, and so, in spite of all apparent differences and 
contradictions, — nay, rather by very virtue of them, 
— became his truest continuators. 



CHAPTER V. 



THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. 

THE term science, in the title of this chapter, is 
to be taken in the restricted sense, for which 
Kant has been preparing us and which has now be- 
come confirmed by prevalent usage. By science we 
mean mathematical and physical science, the sole 
subject-matter of which is found in sensible pheno- 
mena or in their conditioning and universal forms. 
The " principles of science " are the universal and 
necessary laws of sensible phenomena. Sensible 
phenomena are conscious or known phenomena. 
They are " objects," regarded as entering into and 
forming a part of our consciousness, not as existing 
independently of it and " in themselves. " They are 
an organic part of our knowledge, or must become 
such, in order to be anything for us. Their laws, 
therefore, belong to them only in so far as they are 
known or knowable. Their universal and necessary 
laws, or " the principles of science," are nothing but 
the universal and necessary laws of sensible knowl- 
edge. They flow from and are nothing but an ex- 
pression of the essential and conditioning nature 
of such knowledge. They are determined from 
within, and not from without. The particular and 
apparently contingent laws of phenomena, on the 

136 






THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. 137 

contrary, which are learned by special analysis and 

induction, and seem to be simply impressed upon our 
observing consciousness from without, are. as such, 
not principles of science, but only matter of scien- 
tific information. Yet they, too, turn out. upon 
examination, to be but special cases under and in 
conformity to the principles. They illustrate the 
principles and so illustrate the truth, which is a 
priori obvious, that the impress of the laws of sen- 
sible knowledge, as such, or considered universally, 
must appear in all the particulars of such knowl- 
edge. The accidental must bear the form of the 
necessary; the a posteriori, of the a priori. 

Xow, the necessary and universal elements of sen- 
sible knowledge, (the elements which determine and 
indeed make up its form or ineradicable nature.) 
have been " metaphysically " and " transcendentally " 
deduced in the foregoing chapters. They are *— in 
dependence on the pure forms of sensible perception, 
or space and time, — the so-called categories, or pure 
and original conceptions, of the understanding. The 
necessary and universal principles of such knowl- 
edge, or ; ' the principles of science, '' can therefore 
be nothing but another — expanded or generalized — 
version of these elements.* They are a completer 
or more definite statement of that which the cate- 
gories imply. The categories are single notions, 
and elements of definite judgments. The principles 

* In view of this their purely intellectual origin, Kant's expression 
for them is. not "principles of science/' but .*• principles of the pure 
understanding. "' 



188 kant's critique of puke reason. 

are these judgments themselves. Our work in the 
present chapter must accordingly be not so much a 
labor of exploration, as of developed statement and 
application. 

When the term " understanding " is not employed 
as a general designation for mind or intellect as a 
whole, it denotes, according to Kant, one of three 
principal faculties or functions of knowledge, which 
are termed Understanding, Judgment, and Season. 
Corresponding to this division and arrangement, 
ordinary logic treats, under different heads, of Con- 
ceptions, Judgments, and Syllogisms or Inferences. 
In discussing and " deducing " the categories, we 
have, accordingly, treated of the first part of our 
" Transcendental Logic," and at the same time fur- 
nished what might have been termed a " Transcen- 
dental Science of the Understanding,'' in the more 
special sense of this term. What we have now 
before us is, correspondingly, — and is termed by 
Kant, — the "Transcendental Science of Judgment. v 

Common logic does not teach us, through its doc- 
trine of " Judgments/ 1 what we ought to judge true 
or false. It simply declares what logical forms our 
judgments must assume, whether they be true or 
false. "A right judgment in all things,' 1 or even 
in any particular thing, is not learned by studying 
logic, as thus understood, but, the rather, by prac- 
tice. That part of " Transcendental Logic, 1 ' on the 
contrary, which treats of judgment, undertakes, and 
with good reason, to prescribe certain definite, yet 
universal, judgments respecting matters of fact — 



THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. 139 

respecting the true and the false for us — which we 
must necessarily adopt. It treats of what we must 
judge, as a condition of our judging anything aright, 
in matters of scientific knowledge. It leaves nothing 
to " mother wit." There is no place in it for mere 
inductive probabilities. The reason of this is. that 
it has to do with conceptions and relations which 
are logically prior to all contingent experience: 
whence the judgments founded on them must be 
removed from the uncertainties of a posteriori or 
contingent demonstration, and must be as necessary 
and universal for every human intelligence as are 
the conceptions themselves. 

Before developing these judgments — the princi- 
ples of all "science" — Kant deems it necessary to 
answer explicitly a preliminary question. In the 
preceding chapters a number of so-called "pure 
conceptions of the understanding " have been de- 
duced and demonstrated as necessary " forms of 
thought." with which all objects of sensible knowl- 
edge must be invested in order really to be known 
at all. If such investiture be both necessary and 
universal, it must surely needs be possible! But 
the question has not been expressly raised and an- 
swered, How is this possible? The question is cer- 
tainly and visibly one that may well seem adapted 
to excite a curious interest, owing to the circum- 
stance that sensible perceptions, in the form of which 
objects are given, and pure conceptions of the un- 
derstanding are ostensibly quite heterogeneous. 
Sense and understanding are. by our original hv- 



140 KANT'S critique of puke reason. 

pothesis, completely opposed to each other, like fire 
and water. How can one be successfully ''applied " 
to the other? Or, to state the case more technically 
and exactly: the forms of thought are conceptions, 
under which sensible objects are to be subsumed. 
Such subsumption implies that both the conception 
and the object are homogeneous. Thus I can sub- 
sume the sensible object, called a dinner-plate, under 
the geometrical conception, named circle, and say 
that the plate is round or circular, because the con- 
ception and the perceived plate are homogeneous: 
" the roundness, which in the former is thought or 
conceived, in the latter is visibly perceived" But the 
case is apparently quite different when we come to 
subsume sensible phenomena under any of the pure 
conceptions of the understanding, such as, for ex- 
ample, causality. How can I affirm of one pheno- 
menon that it is the cause of another, when, "surely, 
no one will say that causality can be perceived by 
the senses and is contained in the phenomena"*? 
The question seems thus to have a serious, as well 
as a merely curious, interest attached to it, since, 
unless a satisfactory answer can be found for it, the 
principles of science, or the necessary judgments of 
the understanding respecting phenomena, will re- 
main, in one important respect, enigmas, though 
none the less, for this reason, matters of demon- 
strable fact. Indeed, Kant goes so far as to declare 
that the special object, for which a transcendental 
science of judgment is needed, is just to clear up 
this point and to " show how pure conceptions of 



THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. 141 

the understanding can be applied to phenomena as 
such." 

Perhaps Kant rather exaggerates the importance 
of this question, nevertheless, — or, rather, its new 
importance just at this point. The question cer- 
tainly has its importance, if sense and understanding 
are so antithetically opposed, as Kant at the outset 
assumed. But the progress of the discussion has 
tended only to overthrow this assumption. Sense, 
on that side of it which alone was really recogniz- 
able and definable, namely, on the side of its form 
(space and time), has been found to be the creative 
work of that same power of mind, or of understand- 
ing in the larger sense — functioning here under the 
name of imagination — which otherwise manifests it- 
self in the special form of intellect, or of understand- 
in o* in the narrower sense. It would be an occasion 
of wonder if these different manifestations of the 
same power were not essentially homogeneous, rather 
than heterogeneous. And homogeneous we indeed 
found them to be, in this sense, that they were or- 
ganically one and inseparable. The dry light of the 
understanding (considered as a factor in sensible 
knowledge) was "empty" and invisible — i.e. a pure 
abstraction — until broken and filled with at least 
the general outlines of possible objects in the form 
of " syntheses of the imagination." The categories 
— which we are constantly to think of, in this dis- 
cussion, as categories of sensible knowledge only — 
are " functions of unity," yet not for themselves, but 
onlv for the twin-sister of the understanding, the 



142 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

sensible imagination and its products. They simply 
define and name the most abstract and universal 
types or relations of synthetic unity in the forms 
(of space and time) which imagination — itself also, 
when taken by itself, an abstraction — blindly cre- 
ates. Sense, therefore, viewed with reference to its 
intelligible form, is imagination, and as such is no 
more separable from understanding than understand- 
ing from it. Both are inseparable children of the 
same parent, — different aspects of one, organically 
complex, mind-originated process of real knowledge, 
which cannot be decomposed, so that its parts may 
be isolated and separately considered, except upon 
the* same condition on which all anatomy depends, 
namely, that life be previously banished and the 
" parts " under contemplation be thus deprived of 
that vital and organic relation which constitutes 
their characteristic nature. Instead, therefore, of 
asking how one can be : " applied " to the other, it 
were more pertinent — if it were not wholly ab- 
surd — to ask how one can be effectively separated 
from the other, or how, being once separated, any 
mechanical process of " applying " one to the other 
is to restore the living union, which is the condition 
of the existence of each. 

But, it may be said, the question is not at all con- 
cerning the applicability of the categories to the 
mind-generated forms of sense, but to the " matter " 
or " content 1 ' of sense, namely, particular sensations. 
The answer to this is, that the content of sense has 
been shown to be nothing for us, prior to its being 



THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. 143 

received and moulded, or : * combined,'' by the under- 
standing in the aforementioned forms. If you mean 
by " phenomena, " in the question under discussion, 
the content of sense, independently of its form, we 
must tell you that you are dealing with an abstrac- 
tion. Phenomena, in this sense, are never given. 
They are not known or knowable, and consequently 
we have nothing to do with them, or to say about 
them, until we think them; and by the very act of 
thinking them we put the mark of our understand- 
ings upon them, or, what is the same thing, subsume 
them under the categories. How can we know or 
imagine that there is, or can be, a pure content or 
object of sense, which has not, by very virtue of its 
meriting this description, already had the pure forms 
of the understanding "applied" to it? The suppo- 
sition has long since been shown to be absurd, and 
to raise the question how the pure conceptions of the 
understanding can be applied to such content, when 
we can neither know nor imagine a content to which 
they have not been applied, and of which, as given, 
these conceptions are not already the universal life 
and soul, seems like nothing else than mere trifling. 
Kant's own illustrations, above cited, were therefore 
misleading. It was inexact and misleading on his 
part to state that the roundness of the plate is per- 
ceived by the senses, and that thus there is homo- 
geneousness between what is sensibly perceived and 
the '* pure geometrical conception of a circle," under 
which the perceived object is subsumed. For. as in 
substance we have just seen, pure sensible percep- 



144 kant's critique of pure reason. 

tion of a plate, or of any other object, is impossible 
and an abstraction. The plate and its roundness are 
not really perceived at all until they are conceived 
or " thought, 11 and the roundness (in particular) is 
conceived only through and by means of the general 
conception, under which it is subsumed. The homo- 
geneousness is, consequently, here, not between a 
perception and a conception, but between a general 
conception and a particular case in which the con- 
ception was already applied, before we knew or could 
know anything about it. Nor does the other sup- 
posed case, of two phenomena, of which one is said 
to be, in the scientific sense of this term, the cause 
of the other, differ at all in essentials from the fore- 
going. There is indeed no purely sensible percep- 
tion of a " causal !1 relation, or of a definite and irre- 
versible order among phenomena. But neither is 
there any such perception of the phenomena them- 
selves. The purely perceived phenomena which 
Kant here sets over against the understanding and its 
functions, are,. according to Kant's own logic, unreal 
abstractions. They become really perceived phenom- 
ena only when they have been conceived, and by so 
much as they cannot be conceived except as under 
the relation above described, by so much can they 
never be really perceived except in the same rela- 
tion. Kant has thus answered his own question 
beforehand, by showing its substantial irrelevancy. 
The terms which he contrasts, " pure conceptions of 
the understanding " and ' ; phenomena, 11 have been 
already shown by him to be — so far as they desig- 



THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. 145 

nate anything real and actual in the content or 
process of our knowledge — not incognate, but or- 
ganically one. So far, on the contrary, as they are 
viewed in absolute and mechanical contrast, they 
are unreal fictions. This way of viewing them is 
therefore thoroughly artificial and false, and, so far 
as Kant indulges in it, the reader will have no diffi- 
culty in tracing it to its source in Kant's irpwrov 
ipsudoq, or fundamental error, whereby he is led to 
view the subjective and the objective as existing, 
universally, in a relation of purely mechanical and 
unreconcilable opposition. 

Let us now abandon the strain of critical com- 
ment, and briefly see what answer Kant makes to 
the question raised by him, as to how the pure 
conceptions of the understanding can be applied to 
sensible phenomena. Such application, he declares, 
is impossible, unless there be a tertium quid, in 
which conception and phenomenon agree, or which 
is ;: homogeneous " with both. This tertium must 
therefore be, on the one hand, intellectual, to agree 
with the nature of the conception, and, on the 
other, sensible, to agree with the nature of the phe- 
nomenon. These requirements are fulfilled in the 
idea of time. This idea is formal and universal, a 
priori and synthetic, like the conceptions of the 
understanding, and is thus homogeneous with them. 
" On the other hand, it is homogeneous with pheno- 
mena, inasmuch as time is included in every empiri- 
cal idea of a sensuous aggregate " or given " object." 
Through this idea, then, and to the extent now 
10 



14:6 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

described, there is homogeneousness between con- 
ception and phenomenon, or between understanding 
and sense. Further, the " transcendental qualifica- 
tions of time," i.e. its inherent relations, or the 
various ideas or modes immediately involved in it, 
correspond severally with the four different classes 
of categories. These i; qualifications " are the neces- 
sary ideas of time as (1) a series, (2) filled up with 
something, or having a content, (3) involving a 
fixed order of succession, and (4) a whole, including 
" all possible objects." In these ideas, now, the 
four classes of categories are severally " realized." 
Through them the categories first receive "signifi- 
cance " and a possible u relation to objects." They 
furnish the universal form, content, or, as Kant 
scholastically terms them, " schemata/' of the cate- 
gories. It is necessary to remember that, along 
with and under time Kant here includes space. 
Space is the form for " external sense." But exter- 
nal sense is itself a part of internal sense, whose 
form is time. Time is therefore the form for " all 
objects of the senses whatsoever," and so, by neces- 
sary inclusion, of space itself. 

The first three categories are categories of Quan- 
tity. The conception of quantity is that of a whole, 
whose elements may be homogeneous. The acquisi- 
tion of the conception involves, ideally considered, 
the successive apprehension and enumeration of 
these elements and their combination in one whole. 
The pure " schema " of this operation, considered in 
its greatest abstraction, is furnished by the " trans- 



THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. 147 

cendental qualification " or idea of time as a series 
of indivisible moments, or, rather, by the conception 
of number, which is founded directly upon this idea. 

As to the categories of Quality (reality, negation, 
limitation), these obviously acquire for sensible con- 
sciousness a significance only in reference to that 
which fills time, or to its content. This content is 
sensation, which is capable of varying degrees of in- 
tensity, and is held to denote Being or Existence in 
time. 

Under the head of Relation, we have, for the 
" schema of Substance," or that which the category 
of substance denotes, persistence in time; for the 
schema of Causality, regular succession, and of Re- 
ciprocity, or action and reaction, regular coexistence. 

Finally, under the head of Modality, the schema 
of Possibility is agreement of a combination of ideas 
with the universal conditions of time; of Existence, 
actual presence of an " object " to sensation at a defi- 
nite time; and of Necessity, existence of an object in 
all time. 

This is what Kant terms the " Schematism of the 
pure conceptions of the understanding/ ' As will 
have been perceived by the reader, little or nothing 
is therein added to the accounts previously given of 
the categories and of their significance, except in 
the way of formalities of classification and detailed 
statement. 

Repeating, therefore, Kant's reminder, that what 
we now have before us, and all that we have before 
us, is the categories — their nature and the condi- 



148 kakt's critique of pure reason. 

tions of their application — in reference only to sen- 
sible consciousness or pure physical science, let us 
go on to see, in detail, what " principles of science," 
or what necessary and universal, and hence a priori, 
laws of phenomena, they immediately involve. 

It has been demonstrated that no knowledge of 
what is called a sensible or physical object is pos- 
sible, except the understanding intervene to combine 
the separate impressions which the object is sup- 
posed to produce. It has also been shown that the 
supreme combination of the understanding is the 
synthesis of all other syntheses in the all-compre- 
hending unity or synthesis of self-consciousness. 
This combination was the condition of all other 
combinations. And the highest principle of all use 
of the understanding in sensible knowledge was, 
accordingly, that all knowledge of sensible objects is 
subject to any conditions which may be necessary in 
order to make it consist with the unity of self-con- 
sciousness. This is termed the highest principle of 
" all synthetic judgments," and the principles of 
science must be subject and conformed to it. 

The categories expressed the fundamental forms 
of synthetic unity which the understanding, as a 
faculty of self-conscious unity, established among 
impressions, as the immediate and necessary condi- 
tion of their being anything for us, or, what is the 
same thing, entering into our knowledge. " To the 
table of the principles " of science, which are but an 
expansion of the categories into the form of synthe- 
tic judgments, or of " rules respecting the objective 



THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. 149 

employment " of the categories, " the table of cate- 
gories gives us the very natural clue. All prin- 
ciples of the pure understanding," or all of the first 
principles of scientific knowledge, "are, accordingly: 

1. Axioms [respecting the form'] of Perception. 

2. Anticipations [respecting the content] of Per- 
ception. 

3. Analogies [respecting the order] of Experience. 

4. Postulates of all empirical Thought. " 

I. All ;i axioms" (a priori truths, or principles of 
science) " respecting the form of perception " are 
warranted and suggested by the categories of Quan- 
tity, and are summed up in the following principle: 
All sensibly perceived phenomena have magnitude 
of extension, or " are extensive quantities." This is 
evident from the fact that they are all in space and 
time. Space and time are the common form of all 
of them. None of them can exist, i.e. none of them 
can come into sensible consciousness, except as occu- 
pying a definite space or time. But no conscious- 
ness of space or time is simply given. It is i: pro- 
duced" by :: combination of homogeneous elements." 
That is to say, no definite space or time can be 
thought, except as containing in itself an indefinite 
number of homogeneous parts, and resulting from 
the addition of these parts to each other. All space 
and all time are thus a i; synthesis of the homogene- 
ously manifold." The same synthesis is therefore 
necessary to the consciousness of anything of which 
space and time are the form, i.e. of all sensibly per- 
ceived phenomena, or all objects of physical science. 



150 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON". 

And this same synthesis, also, is but another, scien- 
tific description for extension. 

Kant calls attention to the fact that all pheno- 
mena are, when viewed alone in the light of the 
above principles, mere aggregates. The parts are 
independent of the wholes, which latter are, accord- 
ingly, nothing but mechanical, artificial wholes, 
whose parts are held together, not by any force in- 
herent in themselves, nor by the power of an or- 
ganic, ideal, and unifying force which permeates 
them all and puts them in vital relation to each 
other and to the whole, but simply by what seems to 
us as the arbitrary law of our subjective intuition. 
The principle of the " axioms of perception" marks, 
therefore, one may say, a most important limitation 
of physical science, in so far as the latter is re- 
stricted to pure sensible consciousness as the only 
source, for it, of objective knowledge, and to the 
forms of space and time as the necessary and all- 
determining conditions, and hence limitations, of 
our conceptions of physical objects. It indicates, 
namely, that life, power, spirit, all of which are 
organic and synthetic and denote more than mere 
aggregates — or "extensive quantities" — are be- 
yond the range of such science, and that the chase 
after either of them, guided by the pre-suppositions 
and methods peculiar to physical science as such, is 
absolutely quixotic. 

The principle of the " axioms " has an important 
bearing on the relation of mathematical to physical 
science, or the application of the truths demon- 



THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. 151 

strated in mathematics to the ' : objects of sensible 
experience"; in view of which Kant terms it the 
" transcendental principle of the mathematics of phe- 
nomena." Can pure geometry, for example, which 
relates only to lines and figures conceived in ideal 
perfection, furnish any assistance to the investigator 
of nature, where no such perfection is to be found? 
The principle under discussion provides for this 
question an affirmative answer. The objects of ge- 
ometry are products of pure syntheses of space (or 
"spaces") in time. But. as pointed out in the ex- 
position of the principle, it is only through the cre- 
ation of such syntheses, all of which are nothing 
but purely i; extensive quantities," or quantities of 
extension, that any phenomena can be apprehended. 
It is consequently on the same condition that i: all 
external experience, and hence all knowledge of the 
objects of experience." depends, and whatever pure 
mathematics proves concerning the condition, the 
same is also necessarily true, mutatis mutandis, of that 
which depends on it, The entrance to the scientific 
knowledge of nature is thus by the door of geometry. 
2. Of the pure conceptions of the understanding, 
those which were registered as categories of quality 
relate to the matter, content, or object of perception, 
and give us a priori, axiomatic warrant t<T~" antici- 
pate " that all perception, on its material, "real." or 
" objective " side, will be measurable, not as an " ex- 
tensive " but as an " intensive quantity," or by the 
degree of its intensity, and to state, as a necessary 
principle of science, that this is and must be so. 



152 kakt's critique of pure reason. 

What we term actual perception is simply sensible 
or " empirical " consciousness. This is more than 
the merely formal or " pure " consciousness of space 
and time. It is the latter consciousness plus partic- 
ular sensations. Sensations are " simply subjective 
ideas, through which we are only conscious of an 
affection proceeding, as we suppose, from some real 
object." Sensations, then, represent the element of 
reality in our consciousness. It is in our sensations 
that peculiar qualities are found, " e.g. colors, tastes, 
etc." These are, however, all empirical, and inca- 
pable of being determined or anticipated a priori. 
The sensational or material element in consciousness 
may apparently be termed the purely qualitative 
element, and the formal element — space and time 
— the quantitative one. About the former element 
only one thing is a priori certain, and this is its 
variability in intensity. If I have a definite sensation 
of redness, for example, I am aware that an indefi- 
nite number of different possible degrees of redness 
exist between my present sensation and the complete 
absence of all sensation of redness. I may say, there- 
fore, that my sensation possesses — not " extensive 
quantity," for in sensation, considered on its mate- 
rial side {Empfinditng) , there is no intuition of space 
or of time — but " intensive quantity," and " corre- 
spondingly I must attribute to all objects of percep- 
tion, so far as the latter contains sensation, intensive 
quantity, i.e. a definite degree of influence upon our 
sensibility." 

Now, there is no perception, and consequently no 



THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. 153 

empirical consciousness, of " objects " without par- 
ticular sensations; " for time and space are in them- 
selves no objects at all of perception." We may 
therefore with absolute certainty predict a priori, 
and " anticipate," that " in the case of all pheno- 
mena, the real object of sensation will possess inten- 
sive magnitude " or denote a " degree." 

The historical student in philosophy will observe 
that the one thing which Kant thus makes a priori 
certain about sensations, or the " Quality " of con- 
sciousness, and the statement of which is elevated to 
the rank of a principle of science, is the same which 
Hume, too, asserted. For Hume our " perceptions " 
differed only — in addition to their numerical dis- 
tinctness — with respect, to their "vividness." 

Kant points out, as the most obvious use of this 
principle, its adaptation to prove that there can. be 
no possible experience, and consequently no experi- 
mental proof of the existence, of absolutely unoccu- 
pied space or time. 

He shows further, by an examination of both ex- 
tensive and intensive quantity, that all quantity 
whatsoever is continuous; and closes with an obser- 
vation, which is significant in connection with the 
history of post-Kantian philosophy and its method : 
" It is remarkable," he says, " that, respecting all 
quantity whatever, we can know a priori only a 
single quality, namely, its continuity, and that re- 
specting all quality (the real element in phenomena) 
we can in like manner know nothing but its inten- 
sive quantity, or that all sensible phenomena are 



154 KANT'S critique of pure reason. 

marked by a degree of intensity; all else is left to 
experience." 

The principles enunciated under the two fore- 
going heads relate directly to perception and its 
form. Here we start directly from perception (An- 
schauung), or its form, ending with the conceptions 
which the principles express. These principles are 
therefore specially mathematical in their nature and 
application. Upon them rest the possibility and, 
within the sphere of all possible sensible experience, 
the objective validity, of the pure mathematical sci- 
ences, and they are unconditionally necessary. 

Under the two following heads we proceed, on the 
contrary, "from conceptions to' perception." Here 
we start with certain categories, those of Relation 
and Modality, the use and application of which de- 
pend upon certain conditions of experience being 
supplied, which are as such contingent. Let there 
be given in perception the definite, but not a priori 
necessary, elements or material of experimental 
knowledge, and we are to see what our categories 
have to do in connection with them, or what rela- 
tion they have to " empirical thought." The result- 
ing principles will be indeed a priori necessary, but 
only on condition that, through perception, " ob- 
jects " are given, to the knowledge of which they 
may be applied. Practically, therefore, or within 
the range of our present subject of inquiry — which 
is only that of sensible experience — these principles 
will be necessary without qualification. But inas- 



THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIEHfcE. 155 

much as they imply the above condition, they are 
termed, not mathematical, but dynamic. 

3. The so-called "Analogies of Experience*' are 
principles of science, the special cue for which is 
given in the categories of relation, namely, Sub- 
stance, Causality, and Action and Reaction. They 
are all but different applications of a principle 
which has already been abundantly demonstrated, 
namely, that no sensible knowledge is possible with- 
out necessary, because a priori and mind- origi- 
nated, synthesis of the elements of perception. 
Such synthesis has been shown indispensable, in 
order that we may have consciousness of any "sen- 
sible object.' " 

It is obvious that the expressions, " sensible ob- 
ject," "real object of sensation," and the like, which 
occur often in the discussion, must be guardedly 
received. Objects — such is the language here em- 
ployed by Kant — are given through, but not in. 
sensible perception. Sensible perception is inter- 
preted and axiomatically denned as the consciousness 
of our being affected, or, as Hume would say, im- 
pressed, by some " object/ 1 (The view involved in 
this definition is a common-place of empirical psy- 
chology, which Kant adopts without critical discus- 
sion.) What the object is, that thus affects us, the 
perception — the only thing of which we are con- 
scious — does not reveal. The object does not appear 
in perception. We are only mysteriously, but invin- 
cibly, persuaded through perception, that the object 



156 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

exists and has affected us. It is therefore only by a 
loose use of language that objects can be said to be 
" given through perception." Objects are not really 
thus given, but only the persuasion that objects, 
as real but unknown and unknowable things, or 
u things in themselves," do really exist, together 
with the raw material, in the shape of uncombined 
elements of perception, out of which we, by com- 
bining them after the " analogy" or subject to the 
law, of our own understandings and their functions, 
the categories, may frame for ourselves the only 
" objects " — namely, phenomenal objects — which we 
are capacitated to know. This work of combination 
is evidently equivalent to the introduction and estab- 
lishment — for us, and as a necessary condition of 
the only kind of knowledge possible for us, — of re- 
lations among perceptions. The categories of Rela- 
tion will therefore furnish the guide and prescribe 
the determining law for this work. 

The deduction of the categories and the develop- 
ment of the laws of their " schematism " have al- 
ready shown that the form in which all combination 
of perceptions must be effectuated, is Time. The 
elements of perception, considered abstractedly, have, 
as they are conceived to be given or "apprehended," 
a certain apparent relation to time. But this rela- 
tion is purely accidental, and, for the purposes of 
knowledge, ineffectual. It is not a real synthesis. 
The elements of perception are given as distinct 
existences in mere and inconceivably rapid succes- 
sion. This result of the speculation of sensational 



THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. 157 

psychology Kant, as we have repeatedly seen, adopts 
from Hume. But the order of this succession is 
purely arbitrary and fortuitous, and, as has been 
shown, is totally insufficient to produce the conscious- 
ness of a definite object. Indeed, since it is mere 
succession without duration; since, as one element 
comes, or " is given," another goes and leaves no 
trace behind it; it is obvious that it is really not a 
thing which we consciously experience, and so di- 
rectly know. It is a matter of purely speculative, 
though necessary, hypothesis. Consciousness becomes 
objective for us only when its elements are combined 
in the specific forms or ''modes' 1 of synthesis, which 
are involved a priori in the nature of time itself, 
and which must be realized in our sensible expe- 
rience, before time itself, and consequently con- 
sciousness, of which time is the universal form, 
and sensible knowledge, which is but a transcript 
of completed sensible consciousness, can be real 
for us. 

" The three modes of Time are Permanence, Suc- 
cession, and Simultaneity. Consequently there will 
be three rules of all time-relations of phenomena, by 
which the mode of existence of every phenomenon 
may be defined with reference to the universal unity 
of all time, and which precede all experience and 
alone render experience possible/' This number 
agrees with the number of the categories of Rela- 
tion, and the three modes severally correspond to 
the categories themselves. 

(a) Substance. — Time is a permanent and abiding 



158 kant's critique of pure reason. 

unity. It is not two-fold; it is not a thing of which 
there exist more specimens than one. Nor is it dis- 
continuous. Its parts are not separated by intervals 
in which there is no time. It -is not capable of in- 
crease or diminution. Strict, unchangeable perma- 
nence and unity are inherent attributes of time. 
Without them, as is obvious, the two fundamental 
relations of time, succession and simultaneity, wouJd 
be impossible. The permanent unity of time is a 
synthetic notion; it expresses the absolute combina- 
tion of all time in one whole. Or rather, since time, 
taken purely by itself, is an imperceptible abstrac- 
tion, this notion is simply the frame-work or form 
of a notion, which, like time itself, must, in order to 
be realized, be taken in connection with, or applied 
to, the perceptible content of time — i.e. to the ele- 
ments of perception, which are the elements of phe- 
nomena, and which are capable of combination in 
the form of objects, or of one universal object, only 
because they are in time. It is not strictly correct 
to speak of a " synthesis of time '' as such. Time 
itself is synthesis, not of itself, but of that which is 
in time, or of the elements of perception. Apart 
from perception — i.e. separated from all content or 
matter of perception — time is therefore nothing 
and its modes are nothing. 

It is obvious, then, that all phenomena, as having 
the form of time and deriving thence the form of 
their combination, must appear and must be viewed 
under the synthetic aspects or relations which are 
obvious and necessary modes of time, and so first 



THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. 159 

under the aspect of essential permanence and unity. 
To view them thus is to regard them as Substances, 
or as making up one absolutely permanent and 
unchangeable sum total of Substance. 

The notion of Substance is thus a synthetic notion, 
the whole nature of which is derived from the form- 
element of time. It is " the condition of all syn- 
thetic unity of perceptions, i.e. of phenomena." We 
speak of phenomena as co-existing and as succeeding 
each other. But coexistence and succession are 
modes of time, and are indistinguishable and indeed 
inconceivable, except in relation to the one un- 
changing and permanent time which includes them 
both in its indiscerptible synthesis. So phenomena 
can be conceived and known as coexistent or suc- 
cessive, only as contained in one sum total of all 
phenomena, which itself is permanent and unchang- 
ing. The very notion of change, which all pheno- 
mena illustrate, implies the notion of permanence. 
Indeed, says Kant, " paradoxical as it may seem, it 
is only the Permanent which can suffer change.'' 
Whenever there is change, there is a subject of 
change which remains, after the change, what it 
was before. Now nothing: can suffer change and vet 
remain the same in the same respect. It must be 
changed in one respect and remain the same in an- 
other. This other respect, in the case of sensible 
phenomena, is their quantity, or, as it was above 
termed, their unchangeable "sum total." Xo ap- 
parently new phenomenon can come into existence, 
except by simple emergence out of the womb of the 



160 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PUKE REASON. 

sum total of preexisting phenomena, in which, in 
another form, it was already contained. No pheno- 
menon can disappear, except it leave behind it its 
quantitative equivalent, though in another form. 
Absolute generation and annihilation are physically 
inconceivable. The disturbance of the unity and 
permanence of substance, which they would imply:, 
would be tantamount to a disturbance of the unity 
and permanence of time and space. To account for 
it, we should have to postulate two specimens (so to 
speak) of time, and to define absolute generation or 
annihilation as transference of the subject of gener- 
ation or annihilation out of one time into another 
time. But the postulate of time as two-fold in its 
nature, and not essentially one, is absurd, and hence 
the notion of absolute generation or annihilation is 
equally absurd. 

It is to be noticed, now, that the physical notion 
of substance, as here developed, is purely quantita- 
tive and applies only to phenomena. It is not a 
conception of the nature of things in themselves. It 
is a conception of nothing, but of quantitative per- 
manence, stability, unity. It is the simplest and 
most universal form of combination among our sen- 
sible impressions. It is the first condition of these 
impressions' becoming for us actual, experimentally 
known phenomena, or objects of consciousness. It 
is an " analogy of experience " or an analogical rule 
of experience, — which is to say, that no experience 
of sensible objects is possible, except these objects 
follow, in our consciousness, the " analogy, 1 ' or 



THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. 161 

adopt the notional form, of substances. In other 
words, no sensible experience is possible unless there 
be some aspect of it. or of its i; objects/' which is 
permanent. And this permanence is nothing but 
an absolute time- (and space-) relation, which there- 
fore, like time itself, is of " subjective " or mental 
origin, and has no absolute ; ' objective " significance. 
What objects are. independently of sensible con- 
sciousness and its forms, this conception of substance 
does not in the least enable us to determine. 

The conception of ;i existence," which physical 
science is thus entitled, and even compelled, to 
affirm, is not that of material substance, as an abso- 
lute entity occupying absolute space. It is only 
that of a sum total of actual or possible conscious 
phenomena, clad in the mental forms of time and 
space, of which sum total all particular phenomena 
are parts and to which all such phenomena are said 
to bear the relation of accidents. It is a conception 
only of appearance and relation, not of being and 
power. It is indeed not a philosophical conception, 
but only a mathematical one, founded upon the 
nature of the governing forms of our sensuous con- 
sciousness, and it implies only that the mathematical 
expressions (if these could be found) for the suc- 
cessive total states of phenomena ( ,; configuration 
and motion,'' in modern phrase) throughout the sen- 
sible universe must have a constant value. This 
purely formal and insubstantial conception of sub- 
stance may seem like the play of Hamlet with the 
title-role left out. Yet there can be no doubt that, 
11 



162 kant's critique of pure reason; 

from the data in hand, which are those of pure sen- 
sible consciousness, or (what amounts to the same 
thing) of pure mathematical and physical science, it 
is correctly deduced and defined by Kant. It simply 
illustrates the truth that terms, having otherwise a 
philosophical or ontological significance, retain only 
a secondary and emasculated meaning, as viewed 
and employed in phenomenal science. Such science 
does not attain to being. The next " analogy of ex- 
perience " and principle of science will show that it 
does not attain to power. 

The following is Kant's theorematic version of this 
first u Analogy of Experience": 

" Amid all the change of phenomena, their sub- 
stance persists, and its quantity is neither increased 
nor diminished in nature." 

(b) Causality. — The second mode of time, and the 
first and simplest of its two fundamental relations, 
is Succession. Time does not stand still. It is in 
incessant and continuous progress. It may be ideally 
divided into parts, called instants, which follow in 
necessary and irreversible order. Through this 
fixed_ and unchangeable series of instants, time 
moves noiselessly, steadily, necessarily on. 

Such, at least, appears to be the case, when, by 
abstraction, we objectify time and seem to contem- 
plate it by itself. But really we cannot, from the 
point of view of mere sensible consciousness, thus 
contemplate time. Time is no sensible object. It 
is no sensible element of an object. It cannot lit- 
erally be perceived. It is not one grand perception, 



THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. 163 

nor is it an infinite and incessant line of successive 
perceptions, called moments, stretching from eter- 
nity to eternity. Time, for sensible consciousness, 
is nothing, simply because it cannot be sensibly per- 
ceived. Time, as a form of sensible consciousness, 
is nothing but an ideal relation, the ideal motion 
or succession, of perceptions themselves. It were 
an idle tautology to say that time is successive. As 
well might one say that succession is successive. 
Time is itself nothing but the succession of percep- 
tions, or of '" phenomena.'' It is this " form," — not 
of itself, or of its fancied ;; instants," — but of sen- 
sible phenomena, or sensations. Moreover, it is a 
synthetic form of phenomena. It does not flow 
from the nature of phenomena themselves, viewed 
on their characteristic, or sensuous, side. In phe- 
nomena thus viewed, there is, strictly, as we have 
seen, no synthesis, no relation, whatever, for they 
all stand in elementary isolation from each other. 
Time notes simply the result of the activity of con- 
scious mind — or the mode of its activity — in com- 
bining the elements of perceptions, or of phenomena, 
to the end (as has been seen) that connected or real 
experience may be in any way possible or actual for 
us. IJjTow, in time, or succession, abstractly consid- 
ered, there is obviously present this element of irre- 
versible order. The concrete fact is that this order 
is — not among the unreal and impossible parts of 
time, but — among the phenomena of which time is 
the form. And this order is the first and essential 
element in the physical relation called cause and 



164 kant's critique of PURE REASON". 

effect. Physical " causation " is irreversible, and in 
this sense necessary, sequence among perceptions 
or — what amounts to the same tiling — among 
phenomena. 

The relation of causation, as thus deduced, is, like 
all relation, of " subjective " or " mental " derivation 
or origin. Hume's difficulty about causation had 
consisted in his inability to discover among percep- 
tions or their imagined objects any real or necessary 
connection. What he missed was, any power, virtue, 
efficiency, or reason, lodged in an antecedent percep- 
tion or phenomenon, in consequence of which this 
phenomenon must necessarily be followed by a given 
phenomenon of another description, so that the 
former could be truly regarded as a constraining 
and producing cause, and the latter as a necessitated 
and produced effect. Not being able to find this, 
he declared that causation was nothing but habitu- 
ally observed sequence. In any alleged case of cau- 
sation, there was no reason discoverable in the na- 
ture of the phenomena concerned, why the relation 
might not be reversed and the alleged cause might 
not become the effect, and vice versa. Thus, so far 
as we could see, " anything could be the cause of 
anything." Eeal, efficient causation was a fiction of 
the imagination, and consequently, he argued, we 
know, and can know, of no necessary sequence among 
phenomena. 

Now Kant, as we have seen, does not deny Hume's 
premise, though he controverts his final conclusion. 
Fume's premise, broadly viewed, is nothing but the 



THE PRINCIPLES OF SCONCE. 1G5 

result of sensational psychology, regarded as analy- 
sis of the purely material element of sensible con- 
sciousness. This result Kant adopts, and argues 
triumphantly that not only is there no real connec- 
tion, but also that there is no apparent connection, 
even, discoverable among the material elements of 
sensible consciousness, — i.e. among perceptions or 
phenomena, — considered as such, or on their purely 
material side. All connection or relation is syn- 
thesis, and there is no synthesis in the pure matter 
of sense, or in perceptions. A fortiori, there is 
no synthetic power in a perception to effectuate a 
necessary connection between itself and a subsequent 
perception, by forcing (as a cause) the latter to 
follow or accompany it. The question of power or 
force has nothing to do with the question of phy- 
sical " causation,'' and must be excluded from the 
discussion. 

But even if we must renounce — from the point 
of view of our present discussion — all expectation 
of finding synthetic, causative power in perceptions 
or phenomena, yet in our consciousness of them 
there is certainly connection. And this connection 
must be there, before we can 4i habitually " observe 
it. If, as has been demonstrated, it is not in the 
phenomena themselves, regarded as the material of 
consciousness, no observation of them, as such, can 
reveal to us a connection in a single instance, — to 
say nothing of habitual connection. The conscious- 
ness of connection does not come from conscious- 
ness of phenomena. It results from self-conscious- 



166 kant's critique of pure reason. 

ness of the mind-originated form in which we com- 
bine phenomena. This form is twofold, consisting 
of time and space; or, since external consciousness, 
of which space is the special form, is but a modifi- 
cation of internal consciousness, of which time is 
the universal form, it may be said that time in- 
cludes space, and that the universal form of all 
our combination of phenomena is time. But that 
which, like the ideal activity that we term time, is 
native to the knowing mind, is inalienable from 
mind and its operations; it is necessary and uni- 
versal for them. For this reason, and for other 
reasons detailed above, the consciousness of time 
and of its necessary modes of synthesis — among 
others, that of irreversible and necessary (not merely 
"habitual") sequence — must pervade all our con- 
sciousness of phenomena. The real and necessary 
connection is there, not flowing from the nature of 
phenomena, considered as the material element of 
sensible consciousness, but only, so far as the limi- 
tations of our present point of view will enable us 
to determine, from that nature, activity, or mech- 
anism of our minds, regarded as knowing-machines, 
which is necessary to the very constitution of con- 
sciousness, and consequently to the recognition of 
phenomena, if not as " things-in-themselves," yet 
as definite phenomenal " objects," or parts, of sen- 
sible consciousness. Sensible consciousness acquires 
at least a quasi-objectivity, only because and so far 
as it is actively dominated and moulded by a "sub- 
jective " form. This form is as necessary and uni- 



THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. 167 

versal as sensible consciousness, or sensible experi- 
ence, itself. From this source, indeed, such expe- 
rience acquires all its necessity and universality, 
or fixed order, and if irreversible sequence is a 
mode of this "form." and if this mode may be 
called causation, then necessary and universal cau- 
sation obtains throughout the whole realm of sen- 
sible experience. 

The irreversible sequence of phenomena means 
their sequence "according to a rule." It is only 
through such, regular, succession that we are able to 
realize in conscious phenomena, — or apparently to 
find realized in them — the indispensable conception 
of time. And it is only through the same circum- 
stance that the world of sensible consciousness be- 
comes in any sense objective to us. and differs from 
" a mere dream." Our apprehension and " synthe- 
sis of phenomena " never occur instantaneously, or 
m bloc, but extend through a series of successive 
acts. In looking at a fixed object, like a house, we 
take in the object by a sweep of the eye and a cor- 
responding succession of apprehended impressions. 
We may, indifferently, begin at the foundation and 
proceed thence to the roof, or follow the opposite 
order. There is nothing to determine the order of 
our apprehension, but in any case it is successive. 
The order of this succession we recognize as purely 
subjective, since it depends on mere accident or on 
an arbitrary determination of the mind. But now 
let it be supposed that all our apprehension of phe- 
nomena were of this nature : suppose that it merely 



168 KANT'S critique of pure reason. 

depended on our fancy whether we should appre- 
hend water as flowing up-hill or down-hill, whether 
we should regard the forest as falling before the 
tornado strikes it or afterwards, what conception 
should we have of time? Would time be the form 
of phenomena? In time, considered abstractly, each 
instant has its definite place with reference to the 
preceding and following instants. But since time 
and its so-called instants are, when considered by 
themselves^ pure abstractions, since time is the form, 
not of itself, but of phenomena, and since its in- 
stants with their definite places are nothing but the 
instants and the definite places of phenomena in 
their succession, it follows that the phenomena, of 
whose order alone time is the expression, must have 
their definite and unchangeable places in the order 
of their succession, i.e. that they must follow accord- 
ing to necessary rule, if time is to be a real form of 
our sensible consciousness. Suppose it were other- 
wise: would time then be a reality for us? Would 
it even possess contingent reality? Obviously it 
would not, and it is equally obvious that we should 
receive no suggestion that our sensible conscious- 
ness was any sort of transcript, whether phenomenal 
or absolute, of an " objective world. 1 ' 

" If, therefore," says Kant, " it is a necessary law 
of our sensibility, and consequently a formal con- 
dition of all perceptions, that the preceding time 
necessarily determines the [place of the] following 
time (I cannot get at the following time except 
through and by way of the preceding), it is also an 



THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. 169 

indispensable law of our empirical apprehension of 

events in time, that the phenomena of the preceding 
time determine whatever exists in the following," 
and this, not through any power or purpose in the 
former, but simply in accordance with an invariable 
and necessary " rule " of order, which connects them. 
Only on this condition can time be continuous and 
hence real for us; for (says Kant in substance) it is 
only in the continuity of phenomena that we can 
empirically or in actual consciousness be aware of 
the continuity of time. When the place of a pheno- 
menon in the order of time is thus determined, so 
that it is independent of our fancy or arbitrary 
determination, it first acquires for us the value and 
dignity of an object. We know where, " by a rule," 
to ;t find " it t; in the context of perceptions." It 
now consists with the coherent, synthetic, orderly 
unity of consciousness. Consciousness, when all phe- 
nomena or all perceptions are thus fixed, can no 
longer possibly be a mere subjective jumble of cha- 
otic impressions — such as, taken by themselves, 
would after all be insufficient to constitute con- 
sciousness. Consciousness is now real, because fixed 
and determinate, and hence it is objective — for this 
is all that, from our present point of view, the term 
" objective " can signify for us. 

The law of Causality, then, considered as a prin- 
ciple of Physical Science or of Sensible Conscious- 
ness, is purely a law of ;i order in time," and not 
of power or efficiency, purpose or reason. The 
terms t; cause " and " effect," as employed in the 



170 KANT'S critique of pure reason. 

statement of the law, must therefore be carefully 
understood accordingly. They have not here a phi- 
losophical or ontological significance. Philosophi- 
cally considered, the notion of " causality leads to 
the notion of action, and the latter to the notion of 
force, and so to the [true, trans-phenomenal, meta- 
physical] notion of substance,'' or of real, active, 
efficient being. This is elsewhere designated by 
Kant as the true notion of causality, of which, how- 
ever, since it is not directly illustrated in sensible 
consciousness, Kant admits us to possess only " prac- 
tical," not " theoretical " or exact, knowledge. No, 
the term causality, like the term substance, has 
here, where we are inquiring simply into the na- 
ture, conditions and limits of sensible conscious- 
ness, and consequently of pare "physical science, only 
a secondary significance, and not its primary or com- 
plete experimental and philosophical significance. 
It denotes simply the fact of regular phenomenal 
sequence. Taken in connection with the other 
"Analogies," it is identical with the conception of 
scientific law. The law of physical " causation " 
does not state what particular laws or cases of 
" causal " sequence we shall find upon investigating 
the phenomena which are presented to us. These 
must be learned by special examination and induc- 
tion. But it dictates beforehand that we shall and 
must find such laws, and this on the ground of an 
examination of the nature and conditions of sensible 
experience. It declares, on this ground, as a neces- 
sary and a priori truth, that we can have no sen- 



THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. 171 

sible experience unless our perceptions are governed 
by such laws. The special laws we learn. The 
principle, being a synthetic one. and : ' the condition 
of experience itself," is one which we, by the very 
act of our knowledge or form of our consciousness, 
introduce into the given held, or contingent sensu- 
ous material, of our experience, and which must 
''therefore precede a priori" or determine the final 
form of, all such experience. 

The i; Second Analogy of Experience," therefore, 
as a principle of Pure Physical Science is- — subject to 
and in accordance with the foregoing explanations 
— the following * ; Principle of Successive Order in 
Time": "All changes take place in accordance with 
the law of the connection of cause and effect." 

(c) Reciprocity, or the Law of Coexistence in 
Time. — The third mode of time. Simultaneity, points 
at once, and clearly, to the necessary and inseparable 
involution, in each other, of time and space, or of 
time and sensible phenomena and perceptions. On 
contemplating it, we perceive at once that time, at 
all events in this mode of it, is purely formal, and 
that it is the form, not of itself, but of phenomena, 
whose other and secondary form is space, and apart 
from which time is a purely unreal, and, absolutely 
considered, an impossible abstraction. We needed, 
as has above appeared, to argue somewhat with our- 
selves, in order to make it clear to ourselves that it 
is not time which is successive, but that succession 
belongs only to phenomena and is only one mode or 
aspect of that universal form of phenomena which we 



172 KANT'S critique of pure reason. 

name time. But no such argument is necessary in 
order to make it apparent that time is not simul- 
taneous, but that simultaneity belongs only to phe- 
nomena, of which time is the form. Simultaneity 
cannot be predicated of one thing only, or of that 
which, like time, we can by no effort of abstraction 
or imagination conceive as more than one. There 
are no simultaneous times, for there is and can be 
only one time. There are only simultaneous events 
or existences in, or in respect of their form of, time. 
We say that things exist simultaneously, when the 
order of the succession of our perceptions of them 
is indifferent. Thus we may look first at the earth 
and then at the moon, or first at the moon and af- 
terwards at the earth, and because both orders are 
equally possible, we say that moon and earth exist at 
the same time. But on w r hat ground? Not because 
we perceive them at the same time. Sensible per- 
ception, if it told us anything, would simply reaffirm 
itself, and say of each of these perceptions, that " it 
is in the subject [in consciousness] when the other 
is not, and vice versa, but not that [these percep- 
tions are objective, and that] their objects exist at 
the same time, i.e. that when the one is, the other is 
also in the same time, and that this must necessarily 
be so, in order that the perceptions may be able to 
follow each other in any order. " In sensible percep- 
tion there is no synthesis. Coexistence is synthesis, 
and it is synthesis which alone gives to perceptions 
an objective character and significance. We do not 
literally perceive the coexistence of objects, or phe- 






THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. 173 

nomena; we sonceive it. What is the condition and 
what the substance of our conception ? The condi- 
tion and the substance are the same. The substance 
of our conception is, as we have just seen, a reversible 
order in the succession of our perceptions. The or- 
der is reversible, and yet it is none the less an order: 
it is definite, fixed, and has the form of a rule or 
law. In considering the category of physical cau- 
sality, we fixed our attention only upon cases of irre- 
versible order of succession among perceptions, and 
treated these as alone exemplifying and constituting 
the substance of the causal relation. But our pro- 
cedure in this respect was arbitrary, as will at once 
appear, if we recur to the result of our inquiry. 
We found physical causation to consist in a fixed 
and determinate order of succession among percep- 
tions. The fixed and determinate order, or " rule," 
of succession was the essential thing and constituted 
the real substance of the conception. That the order 
was also irreversible — this was only an accidental 
peculiarity of the particular class of cases which 
alone we then had occasion to consider. For w r e 
now see that an order, or rule, of succession may be 
fixed and determinate and yet reversible. Its re- 
versibility, or, so to express it, its bi-polarity, does 
not interfere with its fixity and determinateness. 
Would we contemplate earth and moon as coexist- 
ing, either earth or moon may come first in the 
order of our perception. But whichever comes first, 
the other must follow. The order of succession in 
either case is fixed, determinate and " inviolable."" 



174 KANT'S critique of pure reason. 

The first term in the order of succession ideally de- 
termines the second, and that according to a " rule/' 
We may say then, indifferently, that we here have 
before us a case of scientific law or of physical -cau- 
sation, i.e. of fixed order or rule in the succession 
of our perceptions. 

We are now prepared to understand Kant's mean- 
ing, when he declares that the condition of our con- 
ceiving phenomena as simultaneous or coexistent is, 
that they shall stand to each other in the relation 
of reciprocal causality; and since all the phenome- 
na, which are conceived to coexist in any instant, 
constitute the physical universe, the category of 
reciprocal causality must be universal. The sense 
of this is simply that we cannot conceive, and hence 
cannot perceive, a universe as made up of coexistent 
parts, unless we conceive, and in the order of our 
temporal experience perceive, these parts as standing 
in definite relations to each other. All must be 
conceived as cohering in a plan, or order, or con- 
sistent whole, all the parts of which, as in a perfect 
piece of mechanism or in an organic structure, im- 
ply and logically "determine" each other. Every 
part, viewed in its ideal relations, will thus be, in 
Leibnitz's phrase, " a mirror of the universe." 

Thus the category of Reciprocity unites and com- 
pletes the categories of Substance and Causality in 
the conception of a Universe of Phenomena, or of 
" Nature " as One, as One Whole, and the scene of 
one vast system of mutually consistent laws or 
" causal " relations, by virtue of which alone Nature 



THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE, 175 

consists or subsists for us. And as there is no par- 
ticular sensible experience which does not involve 
coexistence, there is no such experience which is not 
logically dependent on the conception in question. 
The Analogies of Experience, taken all together, 
teach, says Kant, that ;; all phenomena are included 
in one Nature, and must be thus included, since 
without this a priori unity no unity of experience, 
and, consequently, no determinate recognition of 
objects in experience, would be possible. " 

Kant speaks of the reciprocal relation of phenome- 
na as a " dynamic " one, or as a relation of " action 
and reaction" (Wechselivirkang). The notion of 
a^encv, force or influence is not contained among 
the data of Kant's deductions, and can, of course, 
not legitimately reappear in their results. Kant's 
employment of such language as the above must be 
regarded in the light of an accommodation to prac- 
tical belief, and illustrates the well-recognized ne- 
cessity, which physical science is under, of associat- 
ing with its categories conceptions of which it — 
namely, pure physical science, considered as an 
analytic transcript of purely sensible consciousness 
— can render no account. The Analogies, together 
with the categories, of the meaning of which the 
former are but an amplified and explicatory ver- 
sion, have relation to and " express." not absolute 
reality, nor force; they 4 * express,'' in Kant's lan- 
guage, ;i nothing else than the relation of time (con- 
sidered as that in which all [sensible] existence is 
comprehended) to the unity of self-consciousness, 



176 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

which unity [in its relation to pure sensible con- 
sciousness] can only subsist and be maintained 
through the synthesis [of impressions] according to 
rules [— " laws " of succession in time, or of " cau- 
sation"]. " 

Kant's statement of the Third Analogy, which he 
terms the " Principle of Simultaneity, according to 
the Law of Reciprocal Action and Reaction," is as 
follows: — "All Substances, so far as they are capa- 
ble of being perceived simultaneously in space, act 
and reaot universally upon each other." 

4. The " Postulates of all Empirical Thought " 
are principles of science, which relate not to objects, 
materially considered, but to the " modality" of our 
knowledge of them. Whether we look upon a phy- 
sical object as only possible, or as real, or necessary, 
the immediate scientific definition or description of 
the object remains unchanged, and the only differ- 
ence is in our mode of regarding it. The " postu- 
lates " are founded upon the three categories of Mo- 
dality, and require little or no explanation. They 
are as follows: — 

a. Anything which is consistent with the formal 
conditions of experience, i.e. with the necessary 
forms of perception and conception as heretofore 
demonstrated, is possible. 

b. Whatever " coheres with the material condi- 
tions of experience" — i.e. is given in sensation — is 
real. 

c. Anything, the reality of which follows, accord- 
ing to the universal conditions of experience, from 



THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE, 177 

the reality of something else already perceived to 
exist, is necessary — or will necessarily be found to 
exist. 

With regard to the last postulate, Kant explains 
that by the necessary he means simply and only 
whatever may be regarded as an effect. When we 
know "the empirical laws of causality/' or of fixed 
sequence, among phenomena, we can affirm, from the 
observed presence of given phenomena, called causes, 
that certain others, called effects, will " necessarily " 
follow. This necessity is not a creative necessity. 
The effects in question are not new " things " or 
" substances," but only new states or conditions of 
things which previously existed; cause and effect are 
but different successive aspects of the same phe- 
nomenon or thing. Nor, as we have seen, is the ne- 
cessity one of demonstrable and recognizable con- 
straint. No power is discovered forcibly determining 
and maintaining the observed and irreversible order 
of cause and effect. The necessity is one of intelli- 
gence. It is a " law of possible experience " — i.e. a 
mind-originated law, on which the possibility of sen- 
sible experience or physical knowledge depends — 
that the place, in the order of phenomena (which is 
the order of our perceptions), of every event shall 
be a priori determinable through its regular and 
invariable relation to a given antecedent, termed its 
cause. This law of synthesis is the central and 
essential condition of all intelligence of " Nature. *' 
Nay, it is the application, by intelligence, of this its 
law to the confused materials of perception, which 
12 



178 K ant's critique of pure reason. 

alone constitutes for us that universal object of in- 
telligence which we term Nature. The necessity in 
question is therefore simply the indispensable hy- 
pothesis of intelligence. Says Kant: u Every event is 
hypothetically necessary. This is a principle, which 
brings all change in the world under a law, i.e. a 
rule of necessary existence, without which there 
would not even be such a thing as nature. Hence 
the proposition, Nothing occurs by blind chance (in 
mundo non datur casus), is an a priori law of nature. 
And so also is the following: No necessity in nature 
is blind necessity, but, the rather, conditioned, and 
hence intelligible (non datur fatum). Both are laws, 
by which the play of changes is made congruous 
with a Nature of Things (considered as phenomena), 
or, what amounts to the same thing, with the unity 
of understanding, subject to whose laws alone these 
changes can become joined in synthetic unity and so 
be made possible objects of human experience/' 

In connection with the second Postulate, Kant, 
upon whom the first edition of the Critique had 
brought the accusation of " idealism " (meaning 
thereby denial of the reality of the external uni- 
verse), introduced into the second edition a brief 
" Refutation of Idealism." It consists in showing 
that the immediate empirical consciousness of time 
involves necessarily, and hence proves, the presence 
in us of a like consciousness of space, and of the 
existence of external " things." To the " realistic" 
student, who has not gotten beyond the Kantian 
and the common psychological conception of " ideal- 



THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. 179 

ism,'* and who recalls Kant's doughty assertions of 
the purely "subjective" nature of both time and 
space, this i; refutation " is likely to appear far from 
satisfactory. To the philosophically-minded student, 
on the other hand, who has gone far enough to per- 
ceive the shallowness of this conception, it is chiefly 
interesting for the remote suggestion which it con- 
tains — not of the absurd fancy that time and space 
are independent of Mind and, in this impossible 
sense, objective, but — of the truth, which is also 
especially implied in the Third Analogy, that the 
conception of space is by dialectical implication con- 
tained in the conception of time. 

Recapitulating, now, we may bring together in 
the following table the Principles of Pure Physical 
Science, or of all Experimental Knowledge of Sen- 
sible Nature: — 

1. All sensibly perceived phenomena have mag- 
nitude of extension. (See above, p. 149.) 

2. In the case of all phenomena, the real object 
of sensation possesses intensive magnitude, or is 
variable in respect of the degree of intensity of 
the sensation through which it affects us (p. 151-3). 

3. Amid all the change of phenomena, their sub- 
stance persists, and its quantity is neither increased 
nor diminished in nature (p. 162). 

4. All changes take place in accordance with the 
law of the connection of cause and effect (p. 171). 

5. All substances, so far as they are capable of 



180 KANT'S critique of pure reason. 

being perceived simultaneously in space, act and 
react universally upon each other (p. 176). 

6. Anything, which is consistent with the formal 
conditions of experience, i.e. with the necessary 
forms of perception and conception, is possible. 

7. Whatever coheres with the material conditions 
of experience — i.e. is given in sensation — is real. 

8. Anything, the reality of which follows, accord- 
ing to the universal conditions of experience, from 
the reality of something else already perceived to 
exist, is necessary, or will necessarily be found to 
exist. 



CHAPTER VI. 



THE LIMIT OF SCIENCE. 

HAND in hand with Kant's demonstration of 
the nature of sensible knowledge has gone, 
thus far, the constant implication and oft-repeated 
assertion that the range of such knowledge is less 
extensive than the field of absolute reality. Sense- 
conditioned knowledge, Kant is ever reminding his 
reader, does not extend to " fchings-in-themselves." 
It reaches only to conscious appearances, to phe- 
nomena. This truth has all along been implied or 
asserted as a sort of negative principle of science. 
And this principle is, obviously, the principle of the 
limit of science. It is with obvious reason, there- 
fore, since it is in the interest of systematic com- 
pleteness that Kant appends to his account of the 
positive principles of science an emphatic and ex- 
plicit restatement of this negative principle. This 
he does in the course of a brief discussion of " The 
Reason for Distinguishing all Objects whatsoever as 
either Phenomena or Noumena." The term " Nou- 
mena," borrowed from Greek philosophy and re- 
habilitated in modern usage, before Kant's time, 
by Leibnitz, is here used as a substitute for the 
expression " Things-in-themselves," which has hith- 

181 



182 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

erto been employed by Kant to denote the trans- 
phenomenal. 

The introduction of such a discussion at this 
point, and for the purpose above indicated, is mani- 
festly pertinent. For unless there be a distinction 
between phenomena, considered as the objects of 
" pure physical science," and something which tran- 
scends phenomena, it is superfluous to speak of a 
" limit " of such science. If the realm of phenome- 
na were coextensive with the whole realm of exist- 
ence, whether real or conceivable, the restriction of 
science to phenomena would be equivalent simply 
to its restriction to that ivhich is; and this would 
be, manifestly, not a limitation, but the perfection, 
of science, and not properly to be termed a restric- 
tion. We need, therefore, to know by what right, 
if any, the distinction between phenomena and that 
which transcends them has hitherto been made, in 
order to be sure that the asserted limit of science 
means anything, and what it means. 

What Kant will tell us on this point will prove 
far from sufficient for any one who desires a com- 
plete account of the ground and nature of the dis- 
tinction between phenomena and noumena. Here, 
as elsewhere in Kant's work, we may observe the 
transitional, and hence mixed, character of his 
thought. And here, as elsewhere, our method will 
require us to distinguish between that in Kant 
which is matter only of dogmatic presupposition, 
and that which logically flows from the positive 
results of Kant's inquiries. The outcome will be 



THE LIMIT OF SCIENCE. 183 

but a repetition of that lesson of Kant which has 
already been before us, — the lesson of the untena- 
bleness of all ontological theories, which are colored 
by materialism, and of the truth of philosophy's 

universal doctrine concerning the exclusive primacy 
of spirit in the world of absolute reality. 

Kant, we have observed, has hitherto employed 
the expression " things-in- themselves " to denote 

the trans-phenomenal, while now he introduces the 
term " noumena." which he proceeds to use hence- 
forth for the most part interchangeably with the 
former expression. Has this circumstance any sig- 
nificance? Are the two expressions historically and 
intrinsically synonymous ? 

One thing is certain, namely, that there exist two 
radically different conceptions respecting the nature 
of the absolutely real, and that these are in direct, 
correspondence with two distinct conceptions re- 
specting the nature of knowledge, or of that pro- 
cess in and through which knowledge consists. We 
have contemplated in our Introduction, and have 
had occasion in the further progress of our expo- 
sition to illustrate, the distinction between the two 
conceptions of the process of knowledge, which we 
have termed, respectively, mechanical and organic; 
the one founded on first appearance only, and the 
second resulting from more careful examination of 
all the facts of the case, as presented in conscious 
experience. "We have seen that the mechanical con- 
ception implies a materialistic notion of the nature 
of subject and object, while the organic one. taken 



184 kant's critique of pure reason. 

together with the facts on which it is founded, re- 
veals subject and object as in their nature, not pri- 
marily, sensible and material, but intelligible and 
spiritual. Mechanism, I say, presupposes subject 
and object in purely mechanical relation to each 
other, and so implies for them a purely material- 
istic and sensible nature. But it finds in the end 
amongst the only data of knowledge which it ad- 
mits, namely, amongst the contents of purely sen- 
sible consciousness, no ground for the mentioned 
presupposition and implication. Theoretically con- 
sidered, the continued maintenance of the presup- 
position is therefore logically untenable, and the 
pure sensationalist must regard the phenomena or 
contents of sensible consciousness as coextensive with 
the whole realm of being. Failing to do this, he 
will of necessity continue to think of the unknown 
absolute subject and object, or of the whole realm of 
absolute, trans-phenomenal reality, after the analo- 
gy of the known, i.e., according to the mechanistic 
hypothesis, of the sensibly known. He will con- 
ceive it as consisting of a " world" or aggregate of 
objects, such, in kind, as are apparently revealed in 
purely sensible consciousness. These objects will be 
for him per se sensible objects, — objects fitted to be 
known by sense, and by sense alone. Only, for man, 
with the accidental limitations of his sense, they 
will be non-sensible. A being endowed with super- 
human sense might perceive them. They are not 
noumena, or objects of intelligence ; they are simply 
sensibilia, whose only peculiarity is that they do not 



THE LIMIT OF SCIENCE. 185 

enter into the peculiarly limited sensible conscious- 
ness of man. They will be identical with those un- 
perceivable " substrates/' wherein Locke conceived 
the real essence of material and thinking ; " sub- 
stances" to consist. 

Now, it is further certain that if the sensationalist 
were looking about for an appropriate expression. 
whereby to designate collectively these supposed but 
inaccessible objects, none could suggest itself to him 
as more natural than the expression " things-in- 
theinselves." And indeed there can be no doubt 
that a direct connection is to be traced between 
Kant's adoption of this term and his study of the 
British sensational psychologists. And we have had 
evidence before us already that so far as he con- 
nected with this expression any definite significance, 
he conceived the thing-in- itself after the material- 
istic manner of his foreign instructors. 

On the other hand, the term noumena is perfectly 
adapted to express that notion of reality which cor- 
responds with the organic conception of the relation 
of the real factors of knowledge. And in as much 
as the organic conception, founded on and flowing 
from a consideration of all the facts involved in the 
process of knowledge or of conscious experience, is 
implicitly or explicitly the conception adopted by all 
philosophy proper, whether ancient or modern, the 
notion of noumena as distinguished from phenomena, 
or of the mundus intelligibilis as distinguished from 
the mundus sensibilis, is in substance as old as all 
deeply reasoned and comprehensively experimental 



186 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON". 

philosophic thought. But noumena and phenomena 
do not constitute for philosophy two separate and 
distinct "worlds'"' of objects or things. No such 
duplicity of worlds is found in conscious experience, 
of which alone philosophy is the interpretation. To 
suppose the case to be otherwise, and to regard phe- 
nomena as one set of objects for knowledge, and 
noumena as another wholly different set of objects, 
mechanically independent of phenomena, were sim- 
ply to assimilate noumena to phenomena, or, rather, 
to the things-in-themselves of mechanical sensation- 
alism. This is what Kant by implication does when, 
in the title to the section of his work now under 
consideration, he proposes to discuss " the reason for 
distinguishing all objects whatsoever as either Phe- 
nomena or Noumena/' And in accordance herewith 
the constant presupposition which we shall find 
underlying the polemic against ' { metaphysics " in 
the following chapter, is that metaphysicians claim 
to have knowledge of a distinct class of objects called 
noumena, but which, by virtue of the logic of this 
very presupposition itself, must, and can only be, 
regarded, and are by Kant regarded, as identical, 
generally, with //m^s-in-themselves. No, philoso- 
phy does not distinguish noumena and phenomena 
as two separate worlds, but as noting different 
aspects of the one universe of being in which man is 
consciously placed. Of these aspects, the one — the 
intelligible aspect, the so-called " world of noume- 
na," — is found to be fundamental and determining, 
the other — the sensible aspect, or ''world of phe- 



THE LIMIT OF SCIENCE. 187 

nomena,'' — derivative and dependent. The two are 
organically one. The sensible world is* the mani- 
festation of the intelligible world. The one is the 
world as given, or sensibly presented {phenomena): 
the other is the same world, as it, with all that of 
which it is the " manifestation,*' is known {noumena). 
The intelligible world is the key to the philosophic 
comprehension of the sensible world. In the- " in- 
telligible world " the one present world of man's 
actual experience is recognized. Here Being — i.e. 
the being, the reality, the essence of the world, of 
our world in its entirety, for the word Being means, 
and can mean, nothing else — is self-revealed. It is 
revealed as the " explanation'* at once of itself and 
of its phenomenal manifestation. It leaves no room, 
and furnishes no occasion, for the supposition or 
postulation of another world independent of and 
" behind " itself, and which is fantastically supposed 
to be more essentially a world than it, or to have 
resident in it a more essential kind of being than 
belongs to it; and this because the only conceiva- 
ble ground for such supposition, namely, the me- 
chanical aspect of apparent opposition and absolute 
distinction between subject and object in knowledge, 
is taken away by the recognition of the organic 
unity of these factors, along with which recognition 
comes the recognition of the intelligible world itself. 
All opposition of ,; worlds'* is thus seen to be but 
relative and superficial and to be contained within, 
but not to transcend, the one world of our actual, 
complete thought and experience. And this intelli- 



188 kakt's critique of pure reason. 

gible world, present in, and identical with the true 
essence of, the sensible world, — this world, imme- 
diately in, through and for which the " sensible 
world " has its being, is revealed as a world of spirit. 
Only on condition that it be such a world is it capa- 
ble of entering, as object, into organic unity with 
•the spiritual subject, in the process of knowledge. 
To this individual self, as we said in a previous 
chapter, the true objective world comes, as a revela- 
tion of his larger self. As the one is spiritual, so is 
the other. And so the " self-revelation of Being " is 
the revelation of Being to itself. It is the self- 
recognition of being. It is spirit taking cognizance 
of its own nature, and finding therein what " pure 
physical science " presupposes, but in its arbitrarily 
limited province nowhere finds, namely, force, the 
causal explanation of phenomenal law, and such 
other " noumena " as Life, Purpose, and a universal 
organism of effective Intelligence. Here the human 
spirit finds itself, not as an atomic substance, but as 
the dependent centre of an ideal life, which is sup- 
ported in the last resort only by a life divine. 

As to a reason, now, for distinguishing between 
phenomena and something which transcends or ab- 
solutely conditions them — be it called noumenon or 
thing-in-itself — pure sensationalism can, as we have 
seen, render none. The reason must be found, if 
anywhere, in our conscious experience, that is to 
say, in the nature and process of our actual knowl- 
edge. Otherwise the distinction is purely fanciful 
arid arbitrary, and is no subject of science whatever. 



THE LIMIT OF SCIENCE. 189 

If knowledge consisted in a purely passive receiving 
of " ideas " or (in the favorite language of sensation- 
alism) in a simple, blank and brute, ;t having " of 
ideas, if it consisted in this and nothing else, no 
distinction of phenomena from the metaphenomenal, 
as objects of knowledge, nor of subject and object 
as factors of knowledge, would ever be made. It is 
because knowledge is more than this, whether one 
choose theoretically to admit it or not, that the sen- 
sationalist instinctively posits both distinctions — 
and then wonders how he ever came to do it! Phi- 
losophy, starting without wilful presuppositions and 
simply striving to take account of the whole process 
and nature of knowledge, finds that knowledge is 
indeed ajrrocess, and not merely a product or result. 
It does not consist in the mere brute fact of " having 
ideas " or <; receiving " sensible impressions. It in- 
cludes this fact, as one aspect of the case, but it also 
transcends it. Sense, the conscious state, is found to 
be a conditioned product. It is not also the con- 
ditioning process. The latter is intelligence, an aet- 
ive spiritual function, whose works and ways are 
not, like sensibly conscious states, (or i; phenome- 
na.") opaque, — or mere blank, inscrutable and con- 
tingent facts, — but self-illuminating, self-explain- 
ing, and the ever-present light and life of all real 
experience. Sense is individual, intelligence is uni- 
versal. The same relation exists between conscious- 
ness and self-consciousness. The former gives to 
knowledge the individual, particular, relative, ap- 
parent, the latter the concretely universal and real. 



190 kant's critique OF PURE REASON. 

The one is conditioned, the other conditioning (with 
reference to the former) and also self-conditioning. 
The one is phenomenal and dependent, the other 
noumenal and absolute. Such is the relation of the 
two, and such is the relation of the conceptions of 
being or of absolute reality which correspond to 
both. 

This is the experimental doctrine of philosophy, 
and it is because Kant contributed so powerfully 
toward its rehabilitation, in an age which had been 
clouded by sensuous or dogmatic prejudice, that his 
work created so great an epoch in the history of 
modern philosophic science. To this end Kant con- 
tributed by every step in his ^Esthetic and Analytic, 
whereby he demonstrated anew that intelligence is 
the ever-present, directive, and even constitutive, 
condition of " sense," or active self-consciousness 
of passive sensible consciousness. He was pre- 
vented from perceiving and acknowledging the full 
scope of his " discoveries " only through the in- 
dividualistic and mechanistic prejudices which he 
imbibed from his age and could never throw off, 
and through the restricted nature of the problem 
which, in consequence of these prejudices, he alone 
set himself to solve. The prejudices in question de- 
termined him to consider man, the knowing agent, 
as purely individual, atomically and independently 
distinct from all but himself, mechanically separate 
from all objects of his possible knowledge. Knowl- 
edge was thus for Kant — as Schelling afterwards 
put the case — simply "something peculiar to the 



THE LIMIT OF bCTENCE. 191 

human subject," a mere accident of the constitution 
of human nature, as differentiated from all other, 
real or possible, knowing "' natures." In other 
words, knowledge was conceived generically after 
the same fashion, in which it is conceived by pure 
sensationalism, namely, as a purely contingent and 
inexplicable product or phenomenon. Subject was 
mechanically separated by an impassable chasm 
from the whole world of absolute objectivity, and 
was only brought into (a quasi) relation with the 
latter through mechanical i; sensible affections. ,, No 
knowledge, therefore, except through or in depend- 
ence upon sensible affections, no true science except 
"pure physical science" of phenomena! This con- 
viction was dogmatically fixed in Kant's mind at the 
beginning of his inquiry and remained so to the 
end. It determined the limit which he set upon 
" theoretical," i.e. upon all scientific or real, knowl- 
edge, or upon knowledge proper. " Metaphysics." 
as an objective science, was a delusion, and Kant's 
inquiry respecting its possibility (as reported in the 
following chapter of this book) was intended from 
the beginning to demonstrate its possibility only 
as an illusion. His positive problem, in connection 
with which alone he performs a professedly con- 
structive or positively demonstrative work, was, ac- 
cordingly, only the problem respecting the possibil- 
ity of pure (mathematical and) physical science. In 
connection, now, with this problem, Kant demon- 
strated, as we have seen, the necessity of intelligible 
factors for the existence of pure physical science or 



192 kast's critique of pure reason. 

sensible knowledge. But, not looking beyond this 
problem, being prevented by his prejudices from see- 
ing that any ulterior problem could exist for theo- 
retic knowledge, the intelligible and conditioning 
factors, whose presence and necessity were demon- 
strated, sank, as we have also seen, to the level of 
merely formal or logically necessary, but purely 
" subjective " and ontologically noil-significant con- 
ditions, of sensible knowledge, and of this alone. It 
was not perceived that and how they led directly 
away from and tended to overthrow the individual- 
istic subjectivism of the starting-point, and so, by a 
broader, but direct, implication, to overthrow the 
mechanical opposition postulated as existing between 
subject and object and to demonstrate their organic 
unity, and so, again, by a further, but also direct, 
implication, to prove the hollowness of the sensa- 
tionalist's conception of " things in themselves," in- 
accessible to knowledge, and to redemonstrate the 
philosophic conception of " noumena, 1 ' or of intelli- 
gible and absolute reality, present and self-revealed 
in knowledge, and that, too. in all, even in sensible 
knowledge. 

It was only, therefore, through an arbitrary and 
prejudiced predetermination to regard the neces- 
sary and universal elements of knowledge as purely 
"subjective 1 ' and "formal," — i.e. as, after all, con- 
tingent upon the accidental structure of the mech- 
anism of cognition in the human subject, — that he 
was prevented from seeing that they are also ob- 
jective and the key to a noumenal world of trans- 



THE LIMIT OF SCIENCE. 193 

phenomenal, because trans-sensible, reality. And 
may we not trace the circumstance that Kant, in 
the heading to the chapter now under considera- 
tion, employs the expression ,c Nomina," instead of 
11 Things-in-themselves," to the influence of an in- 
stinctive sense, on his part, of the real tendency 
of his own previous demonstrations respecting the 
nature and process of knowledge? 

We have said that the distinction between phe- 
nomena and the trans-phenomenal is founded upon 
and interwoven with the distinction in our con- 
scious experience, or in the nature and process of 
knowledge, between sense and the intelligible, or, 
better, the spiritual, conditions of sense, or between 
" consciousness, " the sensible or " felt " and particu- 
lar product, and " self-consciousness," the universal 
and conditioning process. The latter distinction is 
to the former as root to branch. And we have 
said, in effect, that Kant contributed conspicuously 
to lay bare the root, but was so blinded by mechan- 
istic prepossessions as not clearly to see the branch. 
But if this is so, and if the only scientific basis for 
the distinction between phenomena and the trans- 
phenomenal is the distinction, just mentioned, in 
knowledge, it might be suspected beforehand that 
Kant w r ould have little that is instructive to say 
respecting the former distinction, which neverthe- 
less constitutes the express subject of that section 
of his work which we now have before us. And 
this is, comparatively speaking, indeed the case. 
What little Kant has to say on the subject in ques- 
13 



194 KANT'S critique of pure reason. 

tion is rather in the form of crude and fragmentary 
suggestion and assertion than of intelligent discus- 
sion. Thus he remarks that, when we term sen- 
sible things phenomena, having in mind the pecu- 
liar way in which they appear to our perception, 
we immediately imply a distinction between them, 
on the one hand, and, on the other, either the same 
things as they are or may be in their true and un- 
distorted nature, independently of our perception, 
or " other possible things, which are in no sense 
objects of our senses/' but are " simply conceived 
by our minds,'' and that the " objects " thus distin- 
guished from phenomena, being at least putative 
objects of the understanding, are to be termed 
" noumena." Undoubtedly, when we say " phenom- 
ena," we imply, for we presuppose, the distinction 
between phenomena, or " appearances/' and that 
which appears, or between " manifestation " and 
that which is manifested or manifests itself. But 
herewith no account is given of the reason, the 
ground in experience, which leads us to say " phe- 
nomena," and to make the distinction in question. 
And on the ground of the purely mechanical sub- 
jectivism, to which Kant "theoretically" adheres, 
no reason can be given. 

Again, Kant mentions that the conception of the 
existence of " things-in-themselves " involves " no 
contradiction"; explaining that by this he means 
that it is not contradictory to suppose that there 
may be possessed, by some intelligence superior to 
man, a peculiar kind of perception, whereby things- 



THE LIMIT OF SCIENCE. 195 

in- themselves, lying beyond the range of that sensi- 
ble perception with which alone human beings are 
endowed, may be perceived and known. Here Kant 
implies the truth of the universal, experimental doc- 
trine of philosophy, that knowing and being are 
strictly correlative. Things-in-themselves, it is ar- 
gued, may exist, if they may conceivably be known. 
And it is conceivable that, if not how, they may be 
known, because, by hypothesis, our knowledge, " our 
sensibility." is, and from the beginning has been, 
assumed to be something peculiar to the constitution 
of the human mind. Thus a distinction has been 
presupposed between the nature of human knowl- 
edge and the nature of knowledge per se or without 
qualification. Human knowledge was regarded as 
but a peculiar kind of knowledge. There might, it 
was thus implied from the outset, be other kinds of 
knowledge than ours, and hence other kinds of 
known or knowable existence, than the sensible phe- 
nomena which alone we are held to know. Kant's 
present argument is therefore but a restatement 
ot his original hypothesis, in which the distinction 
between different kinds of possible knowledge and so 
of possible being was contained, and not an explana- 
tion of the ;i reason ,! for first making the hypothesis, 
with the included distinction. Observe, further, that 
while the philosophic distinction between phenomena 
and noumena, as, respectively, dependent and abso- 
lute forms of reality, rests upon a distinction within 
our knowledge or conscious experience, the distinc- 
tion which Kant makes between phenomena and 



196 kakt's critique of pure reason. 

noumena, or things-in -themselves, rests, according to 
him. on a distinction without our knowledge or (as 
he conceives it) our possible experience. But if this 
were strictly so, the origin of the distinction in our 
consciousness would be nothing less than miracu- 
lous, for all grounds of knowledge and all reasons 
for making distinctions can only be founded in expe- 
rience; and the value of the argument founded on 
such a distinction would certainly appear very ques- 
tionable. 

However, at various places in the Critique Kant 
suggests a theory respecting the possible nature of 
the superhuman knowledge, by which things-in- 
themselves might be known, founded, as of course it 
must be, to some degree, on a distinction lying 
within our experience. Kant has distinguished be- 
tween sense and understanding. By virtue of the 
former we perceive objects, and through the latter 
we conceive them. Perception and conception are 
shown to be inseparably and necessarily combined 
in our sensible knowledge. And it is only through 
sensible perception that we are held to become aware 
of the existence, though not of the absolute nature, of 
objective reality. Now, suppose that the conceiving 
understanding were to some being also a faculty of 
perception. Such a being would possess the power 
of " intellectual intuition, " or of perception through 
the understanding. While, now, such perception is 
denied to man, Kant suggests that it may be an 
attribute of the Divine Being, and its peculiarity 
would consist in this, that, by the same act whereby 



THE LIMIT OF SCIENCE. 197 

this Being had a perception, he would also " cre- 
ate " its " object. 1 ' He would, it is assumed, know 
that perceiving and creating were in his case identi- 
cal acts, and so be sure that his perception was ade- 
quate and extended to the " thing-in-itself." This 
theory in its crudity can only seem like a burlesque 
on the true and experimental theory of knowledge. 
But it is highly significant for us, and that in more 
ways than one. First, it shows that it is on the 
basis of a distinction which lies within human expe- 
rience — the distinction between sense and under- 
standing — that Kant has a conception of objective 
knowledge as something which might be acquired 
through understanding per se, as well as through 
sense per se. But, secondly, it also shows that the 
notion of the fixed and complete mechanical opposi- 
tion between subject and object, which leads Kant 
to deny to human understanding the faculty of 
material (in distinction from purely formal) knowl- 
edge, is carried over by him into his conception of 
absolute knowledge, leading him to represent the 
latter as consisting in a constant series of mechan- 
ical creations, i.e. of absolute miracles. The subject, 
in perceiving its object, creates it, and so forcibly 
bridges over the chasm which, for human knowl- 
edge, is held to separate subject and object. But all 
this is purely unthinkable. The words convey no 
meaning. It is no wonder, therefore, that Kant 
declares that while we cannot say that t; intellectual 
intuition" is impossible, we can in no fashion con- 
ceive how it is possible. 



198 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

In the theory, of "intellectual intuition" Kant 
operates with two pure abstractions. The one of 
these is the conception of pure subject, and the other 
of pure object. Here pure subject is conceived as 
creatively perceiving pure object. Now. pure or 
absolute subject and pure or absolute object con- 
stitute together that alleged, " unknowable " realm 
which Kant generally terms indiscriminately the 
realm of "things-in-themselves," or of {! noumena." 
But so far as Kant, on the whole, or in particular 
places, practically makes or implies a distinction 
between noumena and things-in-themselves, it is 
important to note that by noumenon he means pure 
subject, and by thing-in-itself pure object. Thus, 
among the marginal notes written by Kant in a copy 
of the Critique kept for his private use (and recent- 
ly published), we read, as one of the notes to the 
section of the Critique considered in this chapter, 
the following definition of " Noumena": "Beings, 
which themselves have understanding, which through 
the operation of their understanding can cause 
[create] the objects of their understanding [or 
knowledge] — i.e. are endowed with will — and of 
which all other categories may be predicated in like 
manner, — in short, pure intelligences." These 
"pure intelligences," or "noumena," are nothing 
but pure subjects. The objects which they cre- 
atively know, or which by knowing they create, are 
pure objects, or " things - in - themselves." But both 
noumena and things-in-themselves, as thus con- 
ceived, are, we repeat, pure abstractions. In thus 



THE LIMIT OF SCIENCE. 199 

conceiving them. Kant quits the field of experi- 
mental reality — or of knowledge, as a conscious and 
experimental process — and trusts himself to those 
wings of a suppositious imagination, with which all 
false metaphysics essays to make its flights. A pure 
subject or a pure object is not only unknown, but 
inconceivable. It is pure nonsense. It is no won- 
der, therefore, that if the realm of :; things-in-them- 
selves " or of "noumena" (or both) is made up of 
pure subjects and pure objects, they are ;; unknow- 
able," and that, as Kant declares, " it is impossible 
for us to conceive how, even if we cannot deny that. 
they exist." 

Kant, now, confusing this conception of noumena, 
or things-in-themselves, or both, which is nothing 
but the illegitimate and irrational product of an 
essentially sensationalistic i; metaphysics," with the 
philosophic and experimental conception of noume- 
na, declares that the conception of noumena (or 
things-rn-themselves: Kant here employs these terms 
indiscriminately), is a purely problematic one. It is 
not positive, but negative. The " understanding " 
is compelled to think it, but, in thinking it, it adds 
nothing to knowledge. How a reality, correspond- 
ing to it, is possible, we cannot conceive. But. not 
being able to evade the emergence into consciousness 
of the notion of such reality, and finding that the 
notion does not contradict aught that we positively 
(i.e. sensibly) know, we must admit that such reality 
may possibly exist. But if so, then pure physical 
science has possibly a positive limit, or there may 



200 kant's critique of pure reason. 

exist a sphere of reality beyond the possible reach of 
such science. To science this possible sphere will 
only be negatively definable as the sphere of " not- 
phenomena." But since the only objects of (physi- 
cal) science are phenomena, it is obvious that if, 
upon some other grounds than those of (sensible) 
knowledge, we find reason to hold definite " beliefs " 
respecting the nature of the trans-phenomenal, sci- 
ence will have as little power to interfere for the 
correction or interdiction of our beliefs, as for their 
confirmation. Thus the establishment of the Limit 
of Science is but tantamount to demonstrating the 
existence of a " vacant space " in our ideal of possi- 
ble knowledge, which may and can only be occu- 
pied — in view of the restriction of all our really 
possible knowledge to pure physical science — by a 
"rational faith." This space, then, Kant proceeds 
in his subsequent Critiques to fill, locating in it 
such noumena as God, the free and responsible Soul 
of Man, and a World of Beauty, and of intelligent 
Order and Design. 

One cannot but be struck with the arbitrari- 
ness of the distinction introduced by Kant between 
knowledge and faith, when absolutely considered. 
But we must always bear in mind the point of view 
of narrow, mechanistic, sensationalistic prejudice, 
from which he starts, and against which he, as the 
representative — the Moses — of his age is leading 
in a good fight. He is leading in a fight against 
this prejudice, but only as one who is still entangled 
in its wilderness mazes. He comes in the end to 



THE LIMIT OF SCIENCE. 201 

the border or limit of the wilderness, but never gets 
out of its shadows. In other words, his constructive 
work ceases before he has achieved a complete sci- 
ence of knowledge, or of man's conscious experience. 
Hence alone it is that what is not of sense is for him 
a matter of faith and not of knowledge. But it was 
much — nay, it was the first and indispensable 
thing to be done, in order to make it possible that 
philosophy should exist on a scientific footing in 
modern thought, — to define the precise nature and 
sphere of sensible knowledge or of pure mathemat- 
ical and physical science.. This being done, philo- 
sophic science would — and did - — soon enough ascer- 
tain what was its peculiar method and field. Without 
it, scientific thought must remain enslaved to the 
mechanistic prejudices of the seventeenth and eigh- 
teenth centuries, and instead of coming, in the guise 
of philosophy, into the free and pure air of living 
reality, must remain asphyxiated in the artificial 
vacua created by a thoroughly sense-determined and 
dogmatic "metaphysics" — the metaphysics which 
Kant demolishes in the following chapter. 

In view, then, of the fact of the incompleteness of 
Kant's work, considered as a scientific examination 
of the nature, conditions and actual content of the 
whole of conscious experience or knowledge, it will 
not surprise us that he is compelled to recognize a 
portion of experience which, in default of its having 
been explored and recognized in due scientific fash- 
ion, has an air of apparent mystery surrounding 
it, and is called an object of unexplained and in- 



202 kant's critique of pure reason. 

explicable, though necessary, ''faith," and of faith 
alone. This remains to him only as a region of 
" practical," and not of " theoretical," experience. 
Such a distinction between the practical and the 
theoretical is thoroughly artificial, not founded in 
the science of knowledge, and it introduces the ap- 
pearance of conflict and opposition, where none in 
reality exists. This will be especially illustrated in 
the following chapter, as it also finds illustration 
throughout KantV other Critiques. It is enough to 
note that Kant, by recognizing the region of ; ' prac- 
tical " experience and finding in it the " noumena 
before mentioned, shows again that the distinction 
of noumena and phenomena is really or virtually 
founded by him, as it must be by every one, upon 
a distinction within and not without " experience." 
Moreover, the noumenal objects vindicated, or to be 
vindicated, for ;; faith," are all of a spiritual, ideal, 
intelligible nature, and have, per se, nothing in 
common with the materialistically conceived things- 
in-themselves of sensational metaphysics. These are 
neither objects of a " rational faith," nor of knowl- 
edge, nor of aught but a false and impotent imagi- 
nation. While, therefore, this conception of things- 
in-themselves is the one with which Kant has seemed 
to be working throughout the constructive portion 
of his work, as set forth in the preceding chapters, 
yet the practical outcome, as well as the inherent 
logical tendency of the whole, is away from this 
conception and toward the opposite, spiritualistic 
one of noumena. Still further: our noumena are 



THE LIMIT OF SCIENCE. 203 

called objects of a rational faith, a faith of reason. 
But what is reason? Not sense, nor understanding 
as a mere factor of sensible consciousness as such, 
but the faculty of knowledge revealed in universal, 
active self-consciousness. Of ;i pure reason, "' as thus 
understood. Kant's work is not the ;i Critique." It 
is only the Critique or scientific examination of 
sense and understanding as factors of specifically 
sensible knowledge, or as factors of ;; pure physical 
science/' This is that limitation of Kant's problem 
which we have before noted. Had Kant carried his 
work far enough to examine and recognize all that 
self-consciousness is in itself, instead of stopping 
short with the mere recognition of the "formal"' or 
t; logical " necessity of self-consciousness to sensible 
consciousness, his practical conception of noumena 
would, on the one hand, have been less incomplete • 
and mechanical, and, on the other, instead of being 
merely practical, it would have been also theoretical; 
" faith " would have been transformed into, or recog- 
nized as, knowledge. 

And so, indeed, the fruits and works of self-con- 
sciousness as elements of knowledge,, and not simply 
of a faith which is only practically, but not scien- 
tifically, justifiable, actually appear in the midst of 
Kant's most " critical " inquiries. Thus, in the sec- 
tion given to the deduction and definition of the 
conception of physical causation, after identifying 
the latter with determinate sequence or rule of suc- 
cessive order, he continues: "This causality leads to 
the conception of doing [handlung']. and the latter 



204 kant's critique of pure reason. 

to the conception of force, and, through it, to the 
conception of substance. * * * Where there is 
doing, and consequently activity and force, there 
is also substance, and in this alone must we look 
for the fruitful source of phenomena."" * Kant does 
not qualify his statement by saying that physical 
causation, which is simply rule of succession, and 
not force, " practically " leads to the conception of 
agency and force, or that substance, as identified 
with such agency and force, is only " practically " 
substance, and is only " practically " to be regarded 
as " the fruitful source of phenomena. 1 ' Yet this 
is what, in consistency with the position which we 
have seen him assuming, he should only say. He 
has no right, in view of the sensible limitations 
which he places on knowledge, to make these state- 
ments, as he does, without qualification. Force is 
known only in rational experience. It is known 
through self-consciousness alone, and never through 
sensible consciousness as such. No one has done 
more than Kant to make this truth a matter of 
demonstration. If, therefore, " knowledge " is to 
be limited to the phenomenal revelations of purely 
sensible consciousness, as Kant has decreed, force 
can only be recognized as an object of "practical" 
faith. 

* Thus far, away from pure sensational "scepticism," and toward 
the recognition of the intelligible as the cause, source, and true reality 
of the sensible, Kant is followed by Mr. Herbert Spencer, who treats 
physical phenomena as manifestations (? occultations, rather, in Mr. 
Spencer's view,) of a "persistent, 11 though indeed persistently "un- 
knowable, 11 because non-sensible, "Force. 1 ' 



the LnriT OF SCIEXCE. 205 

Force and agency, as realities which philosophic 
science alone discovers and comprehends, — to pure 
physical science and agnostic i; philosophy " they are 
confessedly " inscrutable " and " unknowable," — 
being found only in and through that self-conscious- 
ness of ours, which is at once individual and uni- 
versal, and which is itself an active process, and not, 
like sensible consciousness, a mere passive, forceless 
product. — -force and agency, I say, thus known, are 
purely intelligible and not sensible; they are func- 
tions of spirit and -of life. They are known only 
as '''' energies of mind." In defining substance as 
" activity and force." and declaring it thus to be 
: * the fruitful source of phenomena," what is Kant 
doing but defining the true ;i thing-in-itself/' the 
absolute reality, in accordance with all truly ex- 
perimental philosophy, as true noumenon, and hence 
as Spirit ? This becomes more directly clear when. 
in another passage, distinguishing causa noumenon 
from causa phenomenon, he ascribes ,; true causality " 
to the former alone, and discovers the immediate 
type of a causa noumenon in the rational, morally 
free and responsible spirit of man. The employ- 
ment of such language by Kant, without the quali- 
fying explanation that force, agency, causa nou- 
menon, are only objects of practical conviction or 
of a "rational faith," may be looked on as lapsus 
ling nee on Kant's part. They may be more truly 
regarded as evidences that Kant's distinction be- 
tween practical and theoretical is purely arbitrary, 
and that it could not be constantly maintained ex- 



206 kant's critique of pure reason. 

cept through a sustained strain against fact and 
against knowledge, which was too great even for 
so energetic a will as Kant's.* 

We repeat, then, in conclusion, that the whole 
movement of Kant's Critique is away from the ma- 
terialistic or sensationalistic pseudo-conception of 
absolute reality as £/m?#-in-itself, and in the direc- 
tion of the philosophic, spiritualistic and experi- 
mental conception of it as true noumenon. He is 
carried in this direction by the logic of his own 
advance upon the purely sensational theory of phys- 
ical science itself, and by the moral impetus of his 
practical convictions. His work is not complete, 
or philosophic science is not completely established 

* One of the earliest criticisms directed against Kant had relation to 
his doctrine of " sensible affection."" Sensible affection had been as- 
cribed by Kant to the agency of things-in-themselves. In this way we 
were made aware that things-in-themselves exist, but not w hat they 
are. It was argued, now, that Kant, in thus holding, violated his own 
principles. All of the categories, he had maintained, are of " use and 
significance' ' only within the sphere of phenomena. None of them 
can be predicated of things-in-themselves. Among the categories is 
numbered causation. Things-in-themselves can therefore not be re- 
garded as causes, and sensible affection is not to be attributed to their 
agency. This alleged evidence of their existence is therefore no evi- 
dence. This criticism upon Kant must of course be regarded as com- 
pletely justified, if Kant is to be held to the letter of his own " theoreti- 
cal" statements. Theoretically, or as a category of strict science or 
knowledge, the conception of causation has, according to Kant's con- 
stant allegations, no meaning but that which it has for "pure physical 
science. 1 ' It denotes only regular sequence among phenomena. We 
cannot with it transcend the realm of phenomena. It is obvious that 
Kant, in assuming the position, which was subjected to the above criti- 
cism, simply confused his "theoretical"' with his "practical" concep- 
tions. For the quasi •" causation 1 ' of mere law of order in time, which 
is alone known to "pure physical science, 11 he substituted by implica- 
tion the true causation which implies "activity and force, 11 and which 
is mentioned above in our text. 



THE LIMIT OF SCIENCE. 207 

and vindicated by him, simply because the science 
of knowledge is left by him in an incomplete state. 
It is arbitrarily cut short, when the nature of pure 
physical science is established. 

We have treated of Kant's doctrine respecting the 
distinction between Phenomena and Xoumena under 
the title of the kk Limit of Science." Kant's main or 
immediate object in this discussion is accomplished 
in the erection and establishment of the concep- 
tion of noumena merely as a i; Grenzbegriff" or as 
noting a limit or boundary- line, beyond which the 
conditions of sensible knowledge are not and cannot 
be supplied, and of which, consequently, no science 
is possible. The field of strict Science — such is the 
doctrine — is limited to sensible phenomena. All 
science, as relating either to the form or the matter 
of phenomena, is either mathematical or physical 
science. We are taught, then, by the "limit of 
science,*' that when mathematical and physical sci- 
ence, with their peculiar presuppositions, conditions 
and method, have accomplished their utmost, they 
have only accomplished the analysis of sensible ap- 
pearances. They have advanced by no step toward 
knowledge respecting the absolute nature of things. 
They have not answered, they can never answer, 
philosophy's simple question, What is? All ; ' meta- 
physics," therefore, which, like the prevalent meta- 
physics of modern times before Kant, seeks to find 
answers to ontological, or strictly philosophical, 
questions, while adopting the presuppositions and 
employing the peculiar categories and method of 



208 KANT'S critique OF PURE REASON". 

sensible knowledge (or, in other words, of purely 
mathematical and physical science), is a delusion. 
Its results are simple dogmatism, and in no sense 
science. Its last word must, in logical consistency, 
be the same as that by which pure physical science, 
reaching the final limit of its inquiries, expresses its 
relation to the invisible Beyond, namely, agnosti- 
cism. That this is so, Kant seeks further to demon- 
strate in the " Transcendental Dialectic " — which 
thus itself appears simply as a new, but indirect, 
demonstration of the "limit" of purely mathemati- 
cal and physical " science." 



CHAPTER VII. 



THE FUTILITY OF " METAPHYSICS." 

THE original inquiry of the " Critique of Pure 
Reason " was respecting the possibility of i; syn- 
thetic judgments a priori." It was found, in the 
first place, that mathematical and physical science 
actually contains such judgments. All truths of 
pure mathematics — as it appeared, — and at least 
some truths of pure physics, find their expression in 
propositions, in which the predicate is not derived 
from the subject by mere analysis of the latter, and 
in which the connection between subject and predi- 
cate is, by general admission, necessary and univer- 
sal. This state of things was further found to be 
impossible, on the supposition that all thought and 
all knowledge are the product of purely receptive, 
sensible experience. For in such experience, strictly 
considered, it was seen that there is contained no 
synthesis, or combination of impressions or ideas, 
whatever, whether necessary or contingent, univer- 
sal or particular. There was no alternative, there- 
fore, but to assume (in agreement with obvious fact) 
that knowing is more than passively receiving blows 
of " impression, " and is an activity, and that in this 

activity we must look for the explanation of the 
14 209 



210 KANT'S critique OF PURE REASON". 

synthetic, and of the necessary and universal, charac- 
ter of the judgments in question. From this source 
of constructive and synthetic activity were then 
derived those forms of perception (space and time) 
and of conception (the categories) which were found 
to underlie, and to be essential for the possibility of, 
all kinds of synthesis whatsoever in sensible knowl- 
edge, and which, in their application, furnished the 
stated, fixed and universal principles of all science 
of sensible objects. In short, Synthesis, in knowl- 
edge conditioned whether by the forms of sense 
(mathematics) or by its matter (physical science), 
meant Mind. But Mind knew itself, in its synthetic 
activity as exhibited in the process of mathematical 
and physical, or sense-conditioned, knowledge, only 
as a form-giving and form-determining activity, — 
an activity determining the form which sensible 
" objects " of knowledge, considered as distinct from 
itself, the true subject, must take, in order in any 
way to become objects for it. What itself was or 
might be in its own intrinsic nature, it had no 
direct occasion to inquire. The result was, to show 
how mind appears in sensible knowing, not what it 
is in itself. The like w T as found to be true with 
reference to the objects of sensible knowledge. 

Thus answer was given to the first two of the 
four special questions into which the main inquiry 
was subdivided (see above, pp. 52-3). And the whole 
result of the special inquiry, by which the answer 
was found, was a determination of the most univer- 
sal principles of mathematico-physical science, and, 



THE FUTILITY OF " METAPHYSICS.*' 211 

at the same time, of the merely phenomenal nature 
and, consequently, of the absolute limitation of the 
field of objects, in the cognition of which these prin- 
ciples find application. 

The two remaining questions were respecting the 
ground in human nature, or in the structure of 
human reason, for man's ineradicable, though hith- 
erto ineffectual, tendency to indulge in " metaphy- 
sics,'' and respecting the conditions within which 
metaphysics as a true science is possible. To the 
former of these questions Kant's answer is given 
in the portion of the Critique entitled " Transcen- 
dental Dialectic," forming the second main division 
of the '"Transcendental Logic"; the latter is con- 
sidered in the ''Transcendental Methodology." We 
have now to deal only with the former. 

Kant's professed conviction of the futility of all 
metaphysics, or philosophy, in the strict and proper 
sense of these terms, rests on such grounds as are 
set forth in the preceding chapter. By as much as 
all things-in-themselves, or noumena, are unknow- 
able, metaphysics considered as science of such objects 
is, of course, impossible, and was there so declared. 
The " Transcendental Dialectic " is mostly taken up 
with the examination of alleged arguments, current- 
ly employed in metaphysics to prove the existence 
and nature of such ultra-phenomenal realities as 
the human soul and God. The demonstration of 
their insufficiency consists, in substance, in simply 
holding them up in the light of certain principles 
heretofore either demonstrated, or else dogmatically 



212 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

adopted as final conclusions, and showing that they 
violate these principles. 

" Transcendental Dialectic " is, according to Kant, 
a " Logic of Illusion. " Moreover, and especially, it is 
a logic of transcendental illusion. This means — in 
agreement with the explanation of the term trans- 
cendental in Chapter I — that it is the logic, theory 
or explanation of an illusion, which has its source in 
the very nature, mechanism or structure of human 
knowledge. The illusion in question is, thus, not 
wilfully produced, but springs up naturally and 
inevitably. That it is illusion can be pointed out 
and demonstrated, but the appearance of it is not 
thereby removed. Thus the astronomer cannot 
prevent the moon's appearing larger to him at its 
first rising than when it is in mid-heaven, though 
he knows and can prove that this is only an illusory 
appearance. 

The "transcendental illusion" is one, in conse- 
quence of which we are led, at first sight, and until 
critical examination has convinced us of our error, 
tc attribute to certain ideas and principles of reason 
absolute validity, and so to suppose that through and 
in them we are brought face to face with absolute 
reality, or into the knowledge of certain "things- 
in-themselves." 

The seat of this illusion is in the Reason. Reason 
is distinguished by Kant from Understanding. Both 
are indeed cognitive functions, — functions, opera- 
tions, or modes of knowing mind ; and both of them 
hence illustrate and share alike the nature of all 



THE FUTILITY OF "METAPHYSICS." 213 

cognition. Cognition, or knowledge considered as 
an active process, is synthesis, and both reason and 
understanding are faculties of synthesis, or of i4 syn- 
thetic unity." But their immediate subject-matter is 
different. The subject-matter of the understanding 
is phenomena, which it renders knowable by com- 
bining their otherwise disconnected elements (sensi- 
ble impressions or affections) according to the law 
or " rules " of the categories. Accordingly, the 
understanding is termed, by Kant, the ;i faculty of 
rules.'* The subject-matter of reason, on the other 
hand, is these very rules of the understanding them- 
selves. Reason would unite these principles of 
synthetic unity, which flow from the nature and 
operation of the understanding, together with the 
manifold special sciences which spring up in accord- 
ance with or subject to the same, under still higher, 
and hence fewer, principles. In short, reason seeks 
an absolute and all-inclusive unity, and absolute 
and all-inclusive principles. It is, accordingly, par 
excellence the ;t faculty of principles," and is so 
defined by Kant. 

Further, conceptions of the understanding are 
distinguished, as immediate products of reflection, 
from conceptions of the reason, which result from 
a mediate process of inference. The direct result 
of attending immediately to phenomena is that they 
are brought to a stand — fixed — under necessary 
and inviolable relations, which issue from and con- 
stitute the very frame-work of understanding. Re- 
flection, on the part of the understanding, concern- 



214 rant's critique of pure reason. 

ing what it thus does and is, discloses immediately 
the pure conceptions of the understanding, termed 
Categories. Conceptions of the reason, on the other 
hand, are founded on or imply a process of reasoning 
or inference, — of which process, however, they con- 
stitute from the beginning the concealed or implicit 
motive. They serve to comprehend (begrelfen), or 
to bring, as it were, to convergence in a common 
centre, all other conceptions. To them, exclusively, 
Kant appropriates the name Ideas (Icleen)* 

The logicians, Kant remarks, have long since de- 
fined reason as the faculty of indirect or syllogistic 
inference. But in the case of all such inferences, 
what is it that reason does? Not, what is the S} r llo- 
gistic process, or form of procedure, described in 
terms of major and minor premise and conclusion; 
but, what is the larger or more general description 
of the conduct of reason — its aim or motive im- 
pulse — in following the syllogistic process? The 
aim of reason, when it syllogizes, is to identify 
the " conclusion " with some larger truth (expressed 



* In an excursus, in which Kant indulges in some suggestive com- 
ment on the Platonic Ideas, he recalls the transcendent significance 
which once alone attached to the term Idea, and contrasts with this the 
far different and quite indiscriminate application, which has been made 
of the term in modern times, to denote any mental state or phenomenon 
whatsoever. Kant -justly remarks that to him, who has once become 
accustomed to the thought of Ideas, as conceptions of the reason, which 
transcend all possibility of sensible experience, it must seem unen- 
durable to hear the sensation of red termed an "idea." The Germans 
to this day are rarely guilty of such barbarism. In English, unluckily, 
the case is different, and in order to prevent confusion it will be neces- 
sary for us to print the word Idea, when it is used as an equivalent for 
Kant's "Idee,^ with an initial capital letter. 



THE FUTILITY OF " METAPHYSICS. " 215 

in the major premise). " Cajus is mortal." This 
special truth (the conclusion) is connected, through 
the minor premise ("Cajus is a man"), with the 
major premise, which is universal in form and sub- 
stance ("All men are mortal"). The exhibition of 
this connection constitutes the " proof." The par- 
ticular conclusion is shown to stand in a relation 
of logical dependence to a " universal rule." This 
rule is a " universal condition " of the truth of the 
conclusion. In short, the movement of reason in 
the syllogistic process is but a special case of the 
characteristic movement of mind in all knowledge. 
It is a movement in the direction of unity and uni- 
versality. A limited fact or truth is merged in 
another and less limited one. But now, if this 
latter is itself still limited and conditioned, — if it is 
not absolute, unlimited, unconditioned, — the move- 
ment of reason is not completed, and reason does 
not rest satisfied until it has. whether by one or 
more " prosyllogisms." merged it in a final prin- 
ciple, or major premise, which is absolute in form 
and nature, — which is itself unconditioned, and is 
at the same time the condition, and, by logical in- 
clusion, the totality, of all other conditions. Or. 
otherwise expressed, the result of all labor of the 
understanding is conditioned knowledge; and the 
rationale or implicit motive of reason (in logical 
"reasoning") is this: "to find, for the conditioned 
knowledge of the understanding, the Unconditioned, 
and thereby to complete the unity of all knowl- 
edge." This is the "logical maxim" or "principle 



216 KANT'S critique of pure reason. 

of pure reason." It requires us, in the presence 
of conditioned knowledge, to go back from con- 
dition to condition, till the whole series of con- 
ditions is exhausted, and we stand face to face with 
the Unconditioned. This is a synthetic principle 
a priori, and a principle of pure reason, — not of 
the understanding. It is the universal principle 
of pure reason. 

Now, of the syllogism, or of " reasoning," there 
are three peculiar forms; and just as the twelve 
forms of logical judgment, or of the operation of 
the understanding, furnished the clue to the corre- 
sponding table of twelve categories of pure under- 
standing, so, argues Kant, we may expect to find 
corresponding to the three forms of the syllogism 
a like number of peculiar Ideas of reason. Each 
of these transcendental Ideas will be a peculiar 
form or expression of the Unconditioned. 

The process, by which Kant connects the Ideas 
with the several forms of the Syllogism (categorical, 
hypothetical, and disjunctive), has a somewhat arti- 
ficial appearance. Suffice it here to say, that there 
is a correspondence, in his view, between each one 
of these forms and one of the three only possible 
relations which, according to him, our ideas can 
have. These relations are (1) to the subject, (2) to 
objects considered as phenomena, (3) to " all objects 
of thought whatsoever "; by which latter expression, 
as the context immediately shows, noumena are 
meant, and more especially God, as the noumenon of 
all noumena, or being of all beings. The transcen- 



THE FUTILITY OF " METAPHYSICS." 217 

dental Ideas are, accordingly, (1) " the absolute unity 
of the thinking subject " (or the Soul), (2) " the abso- 
lute unity of the series of conditions of phenomena " 
(or the World regarded as a sum total of all pheno- 
mena), and (3) "the absolute unity of the condition 
of all objects of thought [noumena, or ; things-in- 
themselves'] whatsoever" (or God). 

There is no doubt, now, that these Ideas consti- 
tute the natural and logical goal of reason. Is the 
goal ever reached? Does reason ever attain to the 
knowledge of the soul, the world as a totality, and 
God? Kant answers that it does not and cannot. 
There is no knowledge, properly so called, of aught 
which is not presented to consciousness in and 
through sensible, affections; — this is the arbitrary 
major premise which we have seen running through 
all of Kant's ontological reasonings, and which he 
maintains to the end. The soul, the world as a 
whole, and God, are not, and cannot be, thus pre- 
sented. Therefore, they are not, and cannot be, 
known. 

But is there not a class of persons, called meta- 
physicians, who profess to know, and logically to 
demonstrate their knowledge, respecting these " ob- 
jects"? Undoubtedly; and justice to them and a 
due regard for the importance of the subject-matter 
require that their arguments should be examined 
and that the defects of the arguments be pointed 
out in detail. And this Kant proceeds to do with 
great minuteness. In considering Kant's work in 
this connection, one or two things must be borne 



218 kaxt's critique of pure reason. 

in mind: First, that the principle upon which his 
criticism rests, is the one above noted, namely, 
that there is no knowledge for man, in the strict 
sense of the term, except of that which is mechani- 
cally, i.e. sensibly, presented in consciousness. Sec- 
ondly, that all of the notions, with which Kant 
operates, are shaped accordingly, i.e. they are ex- 
clusively the categories of sensible knowledge or of 
'•pure physical science." Thirdly, that his employ- 
ment of such notions in the representation of ultra- 
physical, or spiritual and living, reality, can only 
be called — as Hegel calls it — "barbarous"; so, for 
example, when he speaks of the soul and God as 
" things.*' Fourthly, that he attributes to all meta- 
physics the real possession and employment of 
no other categories than those which he admits. 
Fifthly, that, to the greatest extent, the metaphy- 
sics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in 
which Kant was nourished, did indeed blindly and 
fatuously attempt to work with purely or prevail- 
ingly mechanical and physical conceptions; so, for 
example, Descartes and Spinoza, and especially the 
British metaphysicians; — and that Kant's criticisms 
upon metaphysics, as thus understood, are just. 
Sixthly and lastly, that genuine metaphysics, or — 
since the term metaphysics, in view of its evil asso- 
ciations, had perhaps better be dropped — philosophy, 
operates with conceptions of another order than 
those above described : they transcend, but do not 
annul, the conceptions of mechanism. — just as life 
and realit} 7 transcend, but do not annul, the phe- 



THE FUTILITY OF "METAPHYSICS. 11 219 

noinena of mechanism ; and their scientific legiti- 
macy, for the sphere of philosophic knowledge, is 
demonstrated in the completed science of knowl- 
edge, — just as the scientific legitimacy of the con- 
ceptions of mechanism, for the sphere of purely 
physical or sensible knowledge, is established by 
that part of the science of knowledge which alone 
Kant seeks, and with a large measure of success, 
to construct, and which takes account only of the 
mechanical or purely sensible aspect of conscious- 
ness. Kant's criticism, therefore, absolutely fails to 
touch the real foundations or the real superstruc- 
ture of philosophy. 

Corresponding to the three transcendental Ideas, 
" metaphysics " is represented as seeking to erect 
three sciences, termed Rational Psychology, Rational 
Cosmology, and Rational Theology. 

I. 

RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 

The soul is (1) a substance, (2) simple in quality, 
(3) numerically one, and (4) in relation to possible 
objects in space. Such, according to Kant, is the 
metaphysical definition of the soul, in terms bor- 
rowed from the table of categories of the mathe- 
matical and physical understanding. Each of the 
four elements of the definition rests on a separate, 
pretended demonstration: and on the basis of such 
demonstration metaphysics is alleged to build its 
doctrine of the immateriality, incorruptibility, spi- 
ritual personality, and immortality of the human 



220 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

soul. But the whole basis of demonstration, is para- 
logistic, and therefore incapable of supporting the 
superstructure of doctrine built upon it. 

The soul cannot be made the subject of definition 
and demonstration, unless it be first in some way 
given — or, at least, apparently given — as a subject 
of knowledge. Men do not wittingly seek to define 
and demonstrate nought. Where, then, and how — 
in what consciousness or knowledge — is the soul 
thus given? In self-consciousness. But what is 
self-consciousness? Is it the definite consciousness 
of a real something, of a definable reality, which 
may be denominated self ? No, says Kant, it is a 
" mere consciousness, which accompanies all concep- 
tions. Through this ; I,' or ' he,' or ' it ' (the thing), 
which thinks, nothing further is represented than 
a transcendental subject — #, which is known only 
through the thoughts that are its predicates, and 
of which, taken by itself, we can never have the 
slightest conception/' No sensible perception, no 
particular feeling or conscious state, corresponds to 
the pronoun I. Self-consciousness is only the neces- 
sary formal aspect of all consciousness or knowl- 
edge. The notion of self (or the "Vorstellnng des 
Ich") is an ''altogether empty 1 ' one. 

All these conclusions follow, indeed, and must be 
accepted, if, with Kant and the metaphysics which 
he criticises, we accept the mechanical relation be- 
tween subject and object, as it first appears in sensi- 
ble consciousness, as the fundamental and exclusive 
relation of all consciousness. For then subject and 



THE FUTILITY OF " METAPHYSICS." 221 

object are conceived only as absolute opposites. 
Whatever is purely and absolutely objective can 
then in no way be subjective, and vice versa. But 
knowledge is only of the objective, or at least of ' 
that which is apparently objective; — whatever is 
known must be object of knowledge. The absolute 
subject can, by the present hypothesis, therefore not, 
as such, become object. If it becomes an apparent 
object, its nature is thereby absolutely changed or 
concealed. It can therefore not be known. It is 
an " altogether empty " notion. It is reduced, as we 
have abundantly seen heretofore, to the quality of 
a mere form, or logically necessary aspect of our 
knowledge of (phenomenal) objects. 

The soul, then, which seems in self-consciousness — 
or in the consciousness that " I am thinking," which 
" must really or potentially accompany " all other 
consciousness — to be given as an object of knowl- 
edge, and consequently of further possible definition 
and demonstration, is only apparently given. In this 
consists the " transcendental illusion. " It is an 
Idea, and so only a " problematic conception," which 
has no given content, but for which metaphysics 
seeks to find and demonstrate one, by means of four 
paralogisms; arguing as follows: — 

1. The soul is a substance. For it is identical 
with the one, unchanging, logical subject in all 
thought, or with that which is termed " I," " self," 
" the thinker." In this subject, as a substrate, all 
particular thoughts inhere as predicates; and this 
relation cannot be reversed, so that we should con- 



222 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PUKE REASON. 

ceive the subject as the predicate of the thoughts. 
It is therefore a true substance, an independent 
" object" or entity. 

This, according to Kant, is a false inference. Sub- 
stance is one among several categories which the 
understanding supplies for the sole purpose of intro- 
ducing synthetic unity among sensible perceptions. 
These latter are the materials, and the only mate- 
rials, of objects of scientific knowledge. The concep- 
tion of substance is one of the forms under which 
such materials become objective to us. But the soul 
is not given in sensible perception ; it is by hypothe- 
sis only the subject to which simple perceptions are 
given, and cannot, without absolutely changing its 
nature — ceasing to be subject and so ceasing to be 
soul — become an object and thus capable of being 
given in sensible perception. The true " data" are, 
and, from the nature of the case, always must be, 
wanting, on which to found the conclusion that the 
soul is a substance. The argument for the substan- 
tiality of the soul confounds the purely abstract 
logical relation between subject and predicate in the 
proposition " I am thinking," or the relation between 
subject and object in sensible consciousness, with the 
relation between substance and accident; whereas 
this latter relation obtains only within the sphere of 
the object in sensible consciousness. So far, therefore, 
as the thoughts which were alleged to inhere in the 
subject, because they could be logically predicated of 
it, inhere, or denote a relation of inherence, in any 
thing, they inhere, or denote such relation of in- 



THE FUTILITY OF " METAPHYSICS/ 1 220 

herence, only in and among objects presented in, or 
constructed from, the materials of sensible percep- 
tion, — materials which, as above remarked, always 
come to the subject, but never proceed from it, and 
which hence reveal, if they reveal anything, not the 
subject which receives them, but the object whence 
they proceed. The argument for the substantiality 
of the soul must therefore be abandoned as paralo- 
gistic. " The soul is a substance only in Idea, but 
not in [sensible] reality." 

Kant's criticism of the argument in question is 
excellent and conclusive, as against any attempt to 
conceive the soul under purely physical analogies. 
On the basis — as Kant clearly shows — of the purely 
mechanical or sensational theory of consciousness, 
the soul, the human spirit, the " I," can never be 
known as anything but a mere aspect of conscious 
phenomena; — an aspect, which is, indeed, logically 
necessary, but which can never become for us the 
instrument, occasion, or vehicle of objective knowl- 
edge respecting the soul itself. The soul is not and 
cannot be demonstrated to be a tiling. 

The soul is nevertheless for Kant a necessary, 
though transcendental, Idea. It is a problem, flow- 
ing from the nature of human reason. The problem 
is for Kant a theoretically insoluble one, because his 
science of knowledge is only a science of sensible 
knowledge, which separates, or seeks to separate, the 
object in consciousness sharply and absolutely from 
the subject, and restricts knowledge exclusively to 
the former. If, as is the case, this is only a partial 



224 rant's critique of pure reason. 

science of knowledge, and if a completer science, 
founded on comprehensive examination of all the 
facts in the case, warrants and substantiates a differ- 
ent and loftier conception of the soul, than the one 
combated by Kant and maintained by the " meta- 
physics " which he combats, this conception, and the 
ground of evidence on which it rests, are not at all 
touched by Kant's criticisms. - * 

The foregoing illustrates the nature of the con- 
ceptions which Kant criticises in all of the four 
psychological " paralogisms," as well as the common 
theoretical basis of his criticism in each case. The 
remaining paralogisms may, therefore, here be more 
briefly treated. 

2. Since the logical subject in thought — the "I," 
that thinks — is necessarily singular, it is inferred 
that " the thinking I," or soul, is a simple substance. 
But if the soul is not a " substance," it is idle to 
argue that it is a simple one. Simplicity, for the 
rest, is a physical category, having no use or signifi- 
cance, except as applied to given and objectively ori- 

* For the rest, Kant is in possession of this loftier conception, not 
only practically, but also theoretically. We have seen him, in the pas- 
sage cited near the end of the last chapter, advancing the non-pheno- 
menal and philosophical conception of " substance" or absolute reality 
as consisting in force and agency. As regards the soul, now, or the 
" I, 11 the " thinker, 11 the whole drift of Kant's advance upon Hume and 
sensational psychology is toward the demonstration that the subject of 
knowledge is an agent. It thinks ; it not simply has its thoughts, as 
predicates or accidents which inhere in it; it has them only because it 
thinks them. Through his successful criticism of the arguments, which 
conceive the soul, or the human spirit, after sensible and static analo- 
gies, Kant in fact clears the way for the truer and experimental concep- 
tion of the soul in ideal, dynamic, spiritualistic fashion, just as it is 
revealed in the active process of self- consciousness. 



THE FUTILITY OF " METAPHYSICS." 225 

ginated perceptions. The same reasons, therefore, 
which made it impossible to predicate substantiality 
of the logical subject in consciousness, or the : * soul," 
forbid us to attribute to it simplicity. Its simplicity 
is, at the best, only the simplicity of absolute empti- 
ness; emptiness, that is to say, of all perception of 
itself or of all material for knowledge concerning 
itself. To say that the soul is simple, is, therefore, 
to make a purely negative statement. The state- 
ment amounts to a declaration that the soul is not- 
sensible, but does not convey the slightest positive 
information respecting the real nature of the soul. 

3. A precisely similar line of criticism is to be 
employed against the argument for personal iden- 
tity, founded upon the pretended demonstration that 
the soul, as a "simple substance," is numerically 
one and ever the same. We must be able to see the 
soul as a substance, before we can determine that it 
is always one. 

4. The logical subject of thought, called soul, is 
certainly to be distinguished from its corresponding 
object or " objects." But rational psycholog}' errs 
in inferring thence that this subject can exist inde- 
pendently of all objects. The subject must cease to 
be subject; it must abandon its nature and become 
an object or thing presented in sensible perception, 
before we can judge of its ability to exist indepen- 
dently. But the fulfilment of this condition would 
be the realization of the impossible and absurd. 

Thus fail the attempts of " metaphysics " to find 
for " that emptiest of all ideas, the idea of self" (to 



226 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

repeat Kant's words), a real objective content. They 
fail, because, limiting the nature of the soul at the 
outset to the purely subjective, or, at all events, 
having nothing but the purely subjective to start 
with, they seek to define it in terms of its antitheti- 
cal opposite, namely, of the purely objective, the 
sensible, the phenomenal. And since, according to 
Kant's dogmatic assumption, this is the only way in 
which the accomplishment of the main end in view 
can be attempted, the "theoretical" knowledge of 
the " soul " is declared to be forever impossible. The 
soul is knowable at most only as a phenomenon or 
an aspect of phenomena, but not as a thing- in-itself. 
This state of things is a fortunate one in Kant's view, 
since, as nothing can either be proved or disproved 
respecting the soul per se, those " practical " reasons 
which we have for holding to the freedom and im- 
mortality of the soul, and which alone have weight 
with the world at large, are left in full, exclusive, 
and indefeasible possession of the field. 

II. 

RATIONAL COSMOLOGY. 

Kational Psychology sought for an unconditioned, 
or absolute, or pure subject of (sensible) consciousness, 
and found it not. Rational Cosmology seeks for an 
unconditioned, or absolute, or pare object of (sensible) 
consciousness, and not only finds it not, but becomes 
inevitably involved, through the search, in a maze 
of contradictions, which it has no means of solving. 

The object of sensible consciousness is the phe- 



THE FUTILITY OF "METAPHYSICS." 227 

nomenal universe. Rational Cosmology would dem- 
onstrate its absolute nature. The phenomenal 
universe, as such, is given for knowledge only as an 
indefinite and complex series of dependent condi- 
tions. Rational Cosmology would discover and 
demonstrate for it independent and absolute condi- 
tions. In this way it would arrive at knowledge of 
" the absolute unity of the series of conditions of 
phenomena " and realize its transcendental Idea of 
the World as a whole, or as a completed or absolute 
object of knowledge. 

The absolute synthesis of the series of conditions 
of phenomena, which Rational Cosmology seeks, is 
termed by Kant a " regressive " one. It is a synthe- 
sis, proceeding " in antecedentia" and not " in conse- 
quential Starting from a given point in the series, 
it goes back from condition to condition, till it either 
arrives at one first condition, on which all others 
depend, or else discovers that the series is infinite; 
in the latter case, " all the members of the series 
without exception will be conditioned," while yet 
the " totality of them " will be necessarily regarded 
as " absolutely unconditioned." 

The series of physical conditions is complex, hav- 
ing as many aspects as there are classes of physical 
categories, namely, four. The inquiry of Cosmology 
after absolute unity, will therefore take four differ- 
ent directions and seek for the realization or demon- 
stration of four " cosmological Ideas." all included 
in, and together constituting, the transcendental 
Idea of the World. 



228 kant's critique of pure reason. 

The four aspects of the series of " objective " phe- 
nomena are Quantity, Quality, Causality, and Con- 
tingent Existence. 

Under the head of Quantity, we note that phe- 
nomena are subjects of quantitative apprehension 
and description only by virtue of their relations in 
space and time. The search for an absolute or total 
synthesis of the quantity of phenomena will there- 
fore be identical with the search for such a synthesis 
of space and time. Now space and time are first 
given or conceived, as quantities, in the shape of an 
indefinite number of parts — spaces and times. The 
corresponding Cosmological Idea will seek to gather 
these parts into a whole, and to define this whole, 
whether as finite or as infinite. 

Phenomena, viewed quantitatively, are regarded 
upon their formal side. Under the head of Quality, 
on the other hand, they are contemplated on their 
material side, or as possessing "reality in space." 
Here, then, we find what is called " matter," given 
in all cases only as a composition, or as having parts, 
which parts are its "inner conditions." These 
parts, again, have similar "inner conditions' 1 of 
their own, or, in other words, are themselves capa- 
ble of subdivision. Cosmology seeks to determine 
how far this subdivision can go on,, and to prove, 
either that it has an absolute limit, or that it is 
absolutely without limit. The cosmological Idea in 
this case is that of " absolute completeness in the 
division of a given phenomenal whole into its parts. " 

The third cosmological Idea has respect to cau- 



THE FUTILITY OF u METAPHYSICS." 229 

sality in the phenomenal universe. Cosraological 

metaphysics attempts, accordingly, to determine 
absolutely what are the conditions and what the 
possibilities of causation in the world. The object 
of its search is ;i unconditioned causality," or " abso- 
lute completeness in our account of the genesis of 
phenomena." 

Finally, all phenomenal existence is contingent. 
Examine it at any point and you find it limited, 
dependent, insufficient of itself alone either to ex- 
plain or to maintain itself. Is the chain of such 
existence infinite and so, while all of its separate 
links are dependent, yet itself, taken as a whole, 
independent and self-conditioning; or. is there a 
form of being, the existence of which alone is neces- 
sary, and on which all that is contingent depends? 
In raising these questions, and endeavoring to an- 
swer them, metaphysics seeks to fulfil the require- 
ments of the fourth cosmological Idea, whose trans- 
cendental object is " unconditioned substantial exist- 
ence," or " absolute completeness in our account of 
the conditions on which changeable, phenomenal 
existence depends." 

Now the fate of metaphysics, in dealing w r ith the 
cosmological Ideas, is peculiar. In dealing with the 
problem suggested by the psychological Idea, meta- 
physics found all arguments pointing only in a 
single direction and to a single result, namely, to 
the assertion of the soul's existence. The arguments 
were illusory, but the illusion was single or simple 
in nature. But in working out each of the problems 



230 kant's critique of pure reason; 



suggested by the cosmological Ideas, metaphysics — 
so Kant alleges — finds equally decisive arguments, 
leading it to conclusions which are contradictory, 
the one to the other, so that it is impossible to rest 
in either, without wilfully shutting one's eyes to the 
considerations which substantiate the other. Here 
the illusion is double, and pure reason becomes in- 
volved in a four-fold " antinomy," or conflict with 
itself. 

The contradictory conclusions, in which each an- 
tinomy consists, may be set over against each other 
as thesis and antithesis. The several antinomies, 
thus expressed, together with their respective proofs, 
summarily stated, are as follows: 

FIRST ANTINOMY. 

THESIS. ANTITHESIS. 

The world has a begin- j The world has neither be- 
ning in time and is also ginning in time nor limit 



limited in regard to space. 

PROOF. 

Were the world without 
beginning in time, we 
should be compelled to say 
that an eternity has now 
elapsed, that an infinite se- 
ries of past " states of things 
in the world " is now com- 
pleted. In other words, we 
should have to ascribe a 
present limit to that (name- 
ly, a series) which by defi- 



in space, but is in both re- 
gards infinite. 

PROOF. 

The world must have ex- 
isted from eternity, or it 
could never exist at all. If 
you suppose it to have had 
a beginning, you must sup- 
pose an anterior time, in 
which naught was. But in 
such time the beginning or 
origination of aught — of a 
world — is impossible. For 
such beginning would im- 



THE FUTILITY OF " METAPHYSICS." 



231 



nit ion (namely, as infinite) 
lias and caa have no limit, — 
which is absurd. Hence a 
beginning of the world is a 
necessary condition of its 
existence. 

Secondly, were the world 
not limited in regard to 
space, it must be given or 
conceived as an infinite 
whole. It is not thus given, 
as an object of perception. 
Nor can it thus be con- 
ceived. An infinite world 
is an " infinite aggregate of 
real things." To "think" 
such an aggregate, we must 
make a complete survey of 
it, by enumerating all the 
parts. But in order to do 
this, we must have had an 
infinite past time at our 
disposal, — which is impos- 
sible. The only world which 
we can know or think is 
thus necessarily limited in 
regard to space. 



ply a cause or reason for its 
occurring at the particular 
moment, when it did occur, 
rather than at any other. 
At no moment in an abso- 
lutely vacant time could 
such cause or reason exist. 
The world is, therefore, a 
parte ante, eternal. 

Secondly, if the world is 
limited in space, it is sur- 
rounded by unlimited emp- 
ty space, to which it must 
be conceived as standing 
in relation. But empty 
space is nought, and the 
supposed relation of the 
world to empty space is its 
relation to nought, i.e. is 
absurd. There is therefore 
no empty space to limit the 
world, and the world is of 
infinite extent. 



SECOND ANTINOMY. 



THESIS. 

Every composite sub- 
stance in the world consists 
of simple parts, and there 
exists nothing but that 
which is simple or com- 
posed of simple parts. 



ANTITHESIS. 

No composite thing in 
the world consists of simple 
parts, and nought that is 
simple exists anywhere in 
the world. 



232 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 



PROOF. 
This thesis seems so tau- 
tological as scarcely to re- 
quire or admit of proof. 
Will any one deny that a 
composite substance con- 
sists of parts, and that these 
parts, if themselves compo- 
site, must consist of others 
less composite, and so on, 
until at last we come, by a 
compulsion of thought, to 
the conception of the abso- 
lutely simple as that where- 
in the substantial as such 
consists ? It is not the fact 
of their composition, which 
renders composite sub- 
stances substantial. Com- 
position is only an acciden- 
tal relation of or in sub- 
stances, and is not itself 
substantial. When we ab- 
stract from the accident of 
composition, we do not ab- 
stract from substantiality, 
which still remains with 
the attribute of essential 
simplicity. 



PROOF. 

Each of the simple parts 
supposed by the thesis, must 
at all events be in, and so 
occupy a portion of, space. 
This condition of their ex- 
istence is a direct disproof 
of their possibility. A sim- 
ple substance would have 
to be supposed as occupy- 
ing a simple portion of 
space. But space has no 
simple parts. The supposi- 
tion of such a part is the 
supposition, not of space, 
but of the negation of space. 
It is the supposition of a 
mathematical point, which 
denotes merely the positing 
of a limit- in space, but con- 
stitutes no portion of space. 
The smallest part of space, 
in order to be space, must 
possess the essential attri- 
bute of all space, namely, 
extension. But in any ex- 
tension whatever there is 
contained ideal multiplicity 
of parts external to each 
other. A simple substance, 
therefore, in existing and oc- 
cupying any portion what- 
ever of space, must contain 
a real multiplicity of parts 
external to each other, i.e. 
it must contradict its own 



THE FUTILITY OF ''METAPHYSICS. 



233 



nature, — which is absurd. 
The supposition that aught 
exists with the attribute of 
essential simplicity, is there- 
fore baseless. 



THIRD ANTINOMY. 



THESIS. 

The causality of natural 
law is insufficient for the 
explanation of till the phe- 
nomena of the universe. 
For this end another kind 
of causality must be as- 
sumed, whose attribute is 
freedom. 

PROOF. 

All so called natural 
causes are themselves, in 
turn, effects of other and 
similar preceding causes. 
Go back in the series of 
such causes as far as you 
will, and you will never 
light upon a cause which is 
simply a cause, and not also 
itself an effect. You find 
thus only a regressive series 
of conditions, of indefinite 
extent, but no " first begin- 
ning." You never arrive, 
in this w r ay, at an adequate 
description of the cause of 
any phenomenon whatso- 
ever. And yet the central 1 



ANTITHESIS. 

All events in the universe 
occur under the exclusive 
operation of natural laws, 
and there is no such thing 
as freedom. 



PROOF. 

The conception of a free 
cause is pure nonsense; it 
is a wilful and " empty cre- 
ation of thought." It con- 
tradicts the very law of 
causation itself. This law T 
requires that every occur- 
rence shall stand in orderly 
connection with, and follow T 
upon, some preceding oc- 
currence or state of things. 
Now free causation, if there 
be such a thing, is surely 
an " occurrence." It is the 
active beginning of a series 
of phenomena. And yet the 
action of the supposed free 
cause must be conceived as 



234 kakt's critique of pure reasok. 



requirement of natural law 
is, that nought shall occur 
without a cause capable of 
such description. Conse- 
quently we are obliged to 
assume a cause, or causes, 
whose action is absolutely 
spontaneous, being indepen- 
dent of predetermining con- 
ditions, and in this sense 
free; — causes, capable in- 
dependently of beginning 
series of phenomena, which, 
when once begun, proceed 
thenceforth according to 
natural laws. 



standing out of all possible 
relation to any preceding 
occurrence in, or state of, 
the cause itself. It is with- 
out law, motive, or reason. 
It is wholly blind, and its 
action would be the com- 
plete realization of lawless- 
ness, i.e. of disorder, of con- 
fusion. Not only, therefore, 
is "transcendental freedom" 
contrary to the law of cau- 
sation, but the supposition 
of it is in conflict with the 
experimentally known or- 
der and unity of experi- 
ence. We must hence con- 
tent ourselves, in the ex- 
planation of all phenomena, 
with causation by or ac- 
cording to natural law, 
and transcendental freedom 
must be pronounced an illu- 
sion. 



FOURTH ANTINOMY. 



THESIS. 

There belongs to the 
world, whether as its part 
or as its cause, some form 
of absolutely necessary ex- 
istence. 

PROOF. 

Phenomenal existence is 
serial, mutable, contingent. 
Every event is contingent 



ANTITHESIS. 

There is no absolutely 
necessary existence, whe- 
ther in the world as its 
part, or outside of it as its 
cause. 

PROOF. 

Of unconditionally neces- 
sary existence within the 
world there can be none. 



THE FUTILITY OF "METAPHYSICS. 



23- 



upon a preceding condi- 
tion. The conditioned pre- 
supposes, for its complete 
explanation, the uncondi- 
tioned. The whole of past 
time, since it contains the 
whole of all past conditions, 
must of necessity contain 
the unconditioned or " abso- 
lutely necessary," — be this 
regarded either as identical 
with the whole series of 
cosmical conditions, or only 
as a first link in the series. 
In either case, it must be 
remarked, the necessary ex- 
istence in question must be- 
long to the sensible world, 
since, agreeably to the pre- 
mises of the argument, it is 
in time. 



The assumption of a first, 
unconditioned link in the 
chain of cosmical condi- 
tions, or of a first and un- 
conditioned cause among 
cosmical causes, is self-con- 
tradictory. For such link 
or cause, being in time, 
must be subject to the law 
of all temporal existence, 
and so be determined— con- 
trary to the original as- 
sumption — by another link 
or cause before it. Equally 
illegitimate is the ascrip- 
tion of necessary existence 
to the whole series of con- 
ditions in the world. If 
each of these conditions is 
itself conditioned, and so 
contingent, how can the 
whole series of them ac- 
quire the contrary charac- 
ter and be unconditioned 
and necessary ? Finally, 
the supposition of an abso- 
lutely necessary cause of 
the world, existing without 
the world, also destroys it- 
self. For, being outside the 
world, it is not in time. 
And yet. to act as a cause. 
it must be in time. This 
supposition is therefore ab- 
surd. 



236 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

In the foregoing Antinomies, the theses constitute 
the teaching of what Kant terms philosophical Dog- 
matism. The antitheses are doctrines of philosophi- 
cal Empiricism. As to the proofs, those on the one 
side are declared to be as good as those on the other; 
that is to say, all good for nothing. On the side of 
the theses is engaged the hearty practical interest of 
" every rightly-disposed man, who understands his 
true interest." They express (however crudely) 
doctrines, which are " so many foundation-stones of 
morality and religion." But these doctrines must 
fall, if they have no better support than is furnished 
in the foregoing " proofs." On the other hand, the 
counter-assertions of empiricism, in the antitheses, 
are equally baseless and hence equally dogmatic. 

What, then, is the common defect of all these 
proofs? It is that they treat the relative object of 
sensible knowledge as if it were an absolute object, 
the phenomenal as if it were noumenal or thing- in- 
itself. They pretend to deduce ultra-sensible con- 
clusions from purely sensible premises. Founding 
on data which are given in and belong only to 
sensible experience, they seek in their results to 
transcend such experience. 

The common method of procedure in all the 
proofs is substantially as follows. As a major 
premise the principle is adopted, that, when the 
conditioned is given, the unconditioned is also given 
or implied. In the minor premise attention is fixed 
upon some aspect (see above, pp. 227-9) of that series 
of sensible phenomena which is, by general admis- 



THE FUTILITY OF " METAPHYSICS." 237 

sion, only a series of conditioned conditions. The 
conclusion then exhibits or defines that form of the 
unconditioned which, it is argued, is given or im- 
plied in the particular aspect of the series under 
discussion. 

Now, as a matter of abstract logical principle, 
it is very true that who says condition, says there- 
by, by implication, the unconditioned. This is an 
axiomatic principle of absolute thought. Further- 
more, whatever is true in the realm of pure or 
absolute thought, is also true in the corresponding 
realm of pure or absolute being, i.e. of noumena or 
tbings-in- themselves. Xow, provided it is given us 
to know in immediate experience the realm of abso- 
lute being, we are quite justified in applying to the 
cognition of it the aforesaid principle — which is 
the principle of the major premise in all of the 
cosmological arguments; nay, more, we are under 
necessity so to do. But the cosmological arguments 
start from and have to do with, not the realm of 
absolute being or of things-in-themselves, but the 
realm of mere simulacra of being, or phenomena. 
And before arguing about these latter on the basis 
of our major premise, we must take into account 
wherein the simulated being of phenomena consists 
and how it is made known to us. Perhaps it may 
then appear that the principle of the major premise 
has here no legitimate application at all, or that the 
right to apply it is subject to very important limi- 
tations. Such is indeed found to be the case. 

The world is nothing but the indefinite sum total 



238 rant's critique of pure reason. 

of sensible phenomena. The universal form of all 
phenomena is time. This is the same as to say that 
phenomena are simply sensible perceptions. For 
time is intrinsically nought but the conditioning 
form of our sensibility, and can be the form of phe- 
nomena, only so far as these latter are identical 
with the content of our sensible consciousness. Phe- 
nomena, therefore, are known or knowable only as 
they are or may be immediately given in our sensi- 
ble experience. Here they are immediately and 
only given as a temporal series, of indefinite extent. 
In this series each term or phenomenon is condi- 
tioned by a preceding one, and this by another pre- 
ceding it, and so on indefinitely. Here, then, the 
conditioned is indeed given, but the peculiarity of it 
is that it is given in the form of time. Now this is 
precisely what distinguishes the phenomenally con- 
ditioned from the absolutely conditioned, or from 
the conditioned as it would have to be conceived in 
a world of absolute reality or of things-in-them- 
selves. In such a world time is not. If the condi- 
tioned be here given, there is given along with it, 
immediately and eternally, the unconditioned. The 
above principle of the major premise is here uncon- 
ditionally applicable and true. But in the world of 
temporal phenomena the case is different. Here, as 
above remarked, the conditioned is given only in the 
form of an indefinitely extensible temporal series. 
We cannot say, therefore, that the presence of the 
conditioned here implies the presence of an uncon- 
ditioned, which is of like nature with the condi- 



THE FUTILITY OF " METAPHYSICS." 239 

tioned and is given (at least to thought) along with 
it. Here the rational principle of the above major 
premise (namely, that when the conditioned is given, 
the unconditioned is also given or necessarily pre- 
supposed) declines from the rank of a principle to 
that of a mere requirement. It calls upon us, only, 
and incites us to go back as far as possible along the 
temporal series of phenomena, using whatever aids 
are compatible with the conditions of experience, — 
such as history, the principle of physical or serial 
u causation, " the wings of sensible imagination, etc., 
— in order to see, if possible, whether the series 
contains a term which is unconditioned, or w T hether 
the series, taken as a w r hole, is unconditioned, i.e. 
is infinite. But it does not authorize us to assume 
that we shall find the unconditioned in either of 
these forms. 

In reality, we are not only not authorized to 
make this assumption, but to make it would be 
nonsense. Were the sensibly phenomenal world in 
possession of absolute reality, were space and time 
consequently forms of things-in- themselves, and not 
merely of our perceptions, it w T ould indeed be legiti- 
mate for us to declare beforehand, in the spirit of 
the first antinomy (for example), that the world is 
and must be either finite or infinite in regard to 
space and time. But since that supposition is false, 
since the world is for us only as it is given in sensi- 
ble perception, a third alternative is possible, to wit, 
that the world is, in respect of time and space, 
neither infinite nor finite. And this alternative 



240 kant's critique of pure reason. 

critical philosophy finds to be in correspondence 
with experimental fact. Following back the line 
of sensible phenomena as far as we can, we neither 
find a limit nor do we find that the series is unlim- 
ited or infinite. We only find that it is of indefinite 
extent. Now the phenomenal world, qua phenome- 
nal, is only as it is given and as it is knoicable, 
namely, in sensible experience. Since, then, it is 
given only as an indefinitely extensible series, we 
must declare both thesis and antithesis of the first 
antinomy false. And what is thus true of the first 
antinomy, says Kant, is true of all the others. 

The " critical " solution of the antinomies consists, 
thea, in showing that, and why, both the theses and 
the antitheses are baseless. It is " shown that they 
are simply dialectical, or a conflict of illusions, 
which spring from the circumstance that the Idea 
of absolute totality, which has no application except 
to things-in-themselves, is here misapplied to pheno- 
mena, which exist only in sensible consciousness and, 
when they constitute a series, in the successive [or 
time-conditioned] regressus of such consciousness, but 
otherwise have no existence at all." On the other 
hand, Kant urges that the antinomies may render a 
valuable service through the indirect proof, which 
they may be made to furnish, of that doctrine of 
u the transcendental ideality of phenomena' 1 which 
the Transcendental ^Esthetic sought to establish by 
the way of direct demonstration. " The proof would 
consist in* the following dilemma: If the world is a 
whole which exists per se, it is either finite or in- 



THE FUTILITY OF "METAPHYSICS." 241 

finite. Now the former of these suppositions, as 
well a* the latter, is false, as shown by the above 
proofs of the antitheses, on the one hand, and of the 
theses, on the other. The assertion is therefore 
false, that the world — the sum total of phenomena 
— is a whole which exists per se: whence follows the 
truth, which the phrase 'transcendental ideality of 
phenomena' was designed to express, namely, that 
phenomena universally are, apart from our percep- 
tions, or our perceptional ideas, nothing. This ob- 
servation,*' Kant continues, " is of importance. It 
reminds us that the proofs employed above were not 
sophisms, but logically valid and conclusive, pro- 
vided only that we could admit the tacit presupposi- 
tion on which they all rest, namely, that phenomena, 
or a sensible world, which includes them all, are 
things-in-themselves. But the conflict of conclu- 
sions thence deduced discovers to us that there was 
error in the presupposition, and so brings us to the 
discovery of the real nature of things, as objects of 
the senses. The Transcendental Dialectic thus by no 
means favors scepticism, although it does illustrate 
the value of the sceptical method," etc. 

So, then, it appears that in, or in connection with, 
the series of phenomenal conditions, no uncondi- 
tioned is to be found. The principle, that the series 
of such conditions constitutes an absolute and de- 
monstrable totality, far from being axiomatic, is the 
rather purely dialectical, and, when thus stated 
without qualification, is altogether indefensible. It 
is an illusion, and, since it flows from the normal 
16 



242 rant's critique of pure reason. 

play of human reason, it is an unavoidable illusion. 
Now that this, its mirage-like nature, has been 
pointed out, we shall no longer be in danger of 
being deceived by it. But has not the principle an- 
other side, whereby it may still become a serviceable 
beacon-light and true guide to science? This it has; 
for, while, in Kant's language, it is not and cannot 
be a "constitutive principle of reason, whereby we 
are enabled to extend the conception of the sensible 
world beyond the bounds of all possible experience,'' 
it may and must be a " regulative principle of rea- 
son." It prescribes a necessary rule for our pro- 
cedure in all scientific investigation of the universe 
on its phenomenal side. It sets up as an ideal, or 
proposes to science as a problem, " the greatest pos- 
sible extension and continuation of experience," It 
requires us to carry back the series of phenomena as 
far as possible, allowing "no empirical limit to be 
accepted as an absolute limit." In short, it is a 
principle, whose impulse is in the direction of the 
greatest possible, systematic completeness in our 
empirical knowledge. 

The critical solution of the antinomies, whereb}^ 
theses and antitheses were alike discovered to be 
false, applies to the first two antinomies without 
qualification. These are termed the mathematical 
antinomies, and relate to series, the terms of which 
are all perfectly homogeneous and all alike purely 
phenomenal. With the third and fourth antino- 
mies, which are termed d}oiamical, the case may be 
different. In a dynamic series, the terms may con- 



THE FUTILITY OF "METAPHYSICS." 243 

ceivably be heterogeneous. There is always the 
possibility, or at least the conceivable possibility, 
that the phenomenal effect may, in addition to 
its so-called phenomenal or natural ;t cause," i.e. 
its regular antecedent, have a true and noumenal 
cause, which is the real ground of the existence of 
the phenomenal effect; and that phenomenal sub- 
stance may depend upon a super- phenomenal and 
necessary being.* It may be, therefore, that if you 
take into account the foregoing possibility, both 
thesis and antithesis, in the third and fourth antino- 
mies, will or may be true, though in different senses. 
Theoretically and scientifically we shall not be able 
to prove that this is the case, for the beginning and 
end of all theory or science is constantly held by 
Kant to be phenomenal. It will still remain true 
that, theoretically considered, both thesis and an- 
tithesis in these antinomies are false. Our new 
demonstration will rest wholly on practical grounds, 
and will consist only in showing that, and how. 

* As matter of fact, the very supposition that the series of pheno- 
mena is a dynamic one, is itself tantamount to the supposition not 
only that the series may have, but that it really has, a noumenal or 
super-phenomenal cause. To pure physical science (pure sensible 
knowledge) the series of phenomena is not given or known as a 
dynamic series, but simply as a regular series. To call it dynamic is. 
therefore, to go beyond the phenomenal fact and introduce the 
metaphysical or noumenal conception of force, with all that this 
conception implies. In this case, as in so many others, Kant"s intel- 
ligence is confused by the ambiguity of a word — of the word cause. 
He forgets that "natural causation" (causation as regarded by 
"pure physical science") is only regular succession, and strictly 
contains no notion of influence, efficiency, or force. Hence he terms 
it dynamic, not perceiving that by this very act he has transformed 
the series from a merely phenomenal into a noumenal one. 



244 kant's critique of pure reason. 

thesis and antithesis may. without contradiction, be 
conceived as true at the same time — but not that, 
as matter of theoretical knowledge, we can assert 
them to be true. 

Take, first, the Third Antinomy, the antinomy of 
causation. Here the proof of both thesis and anti- 
thesis was founded on an analysis, or on the appli- 
cation of the conception, of " natural causation." 
The result in both cases was conclusions, which were 
alike illusory, because alike destitute of any founda- 
tion in real or possible sensible experience, which is 
the only sphere for which the law of " natural causa- 
tion" is valid. But now suppose that there be 
other, " practical " grounds for supposing the real- 
ity of another kind of causation, namely, noumenal 
causation, or the agency of non-sensible, intelligi- 
ble, spiritual, rationally endowed, causes, possessing 
" transcendental freedom." If this agency can be 
shown not to conflict with the universal presence 
of natural causation (= rule or law) so far as sensi- 
ble experience extends or can extend, then we may 
conceivably with equal truth assert, in the thesis, 
noumenal freedom, and, in the antithesis, natural 
" necessity," or the universality of law. 

Now, man has a double knowledge of himself. 
On the one hand, he knows himself "theoretically" 
or " scientifically," as a sensible being, part and 
parcel of phenomenal nature. On the other hand, 
he is known to himself practically, as possessing a 
rational nature, which brings with it peculiar pos- 
sibilities and responsibilities. In the consciousness 



THE FUTILITY OF " METAPHYSICS." 245 

of his obligation to render obedience to an absolute 
moral law of reason, he has no alternative but to 
regard himself as free, or as a causa noumenon, 
capable of exercising ;t true causality." Scientific 
demonstration that he is free, or even that freedom 
is per se possible, is of course out of the question, 
since such demonstration is possible only respecting 
the nature and order of sensible phenomena, and 
not, as in the present case, respecting that which 
by supposition is a purely supersensible, ideal, nou- 
menal activity. The only question is, can such 
activity consist with the universal presence of nat- 
ural law ? Can man, as a supersensible being, 
become the independent cause of effects, which ap- 
pear in the sensibly phenomenal world and which, 
as such, must stand under the law of a natural 
causation ".? Kant answers this question in the 
affirmative. The question supposes the case of a 
causa noumenon. The proof of the antithesis in the 
third antinomy objected to the conception, or to 
the admission of the reality, of such a cause, on the 
ground that it would not be subject to the law of 
natural causation, or to the law of determinate se- 
quence in time. A causa noumenon, it was held, 
would be virtually a sequent without an antecedent, 
which is absurd. But this objection is wholly irrel- 
evant. The law of time is the law only of phe- 
nomena, of which alone, and not of noumena, time 
is the universal form. The objection, therefore, is 
only equivalent to a reminder that a causa noume- 
non, if such exist, is, at all events, not like a causa 



246 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF* PURE REASON". 

phenomenon, and that its law, if law it have, must 
be different from the purely temporal law of phe- 
nomenal " causation." What the nature and law 
of a noumenal cause may be, it is impossible posi- 
tively to know or state. For such a cause would be 
a thing-in-itself, and, as such, unknowable. We can 
only describe the conception negatively and say that 
a noumenal cause cannot, like phenomenal causes, 
be itself a sequent and dependent on an antecedent, 
by which its place in time is determined. No tem- 
poral relation whatever can be predicated of it, 
since it and time have nothing to do with each 
other. We can only say that a noumenon, which 
is, as such, physically indefinable and hence " un- 
knowable," may at the same time be a cause of 
some kind or other, — a cause, of a kind which will 
itself also be physically indefinable and unknowable, 
although it cannot for that reason be pronounced 
non-existent. While therefore there is no positive 
theoretical, i.e. physico-phenomenal, evidence of the 
existence of noumenal or non-sensible causes for 
phenomenal effects, there is also nothing in the way 
of our assuming their reality, if for any practical 
reason, such as man's moral experience, we find 
occasion to assume it. The thesis, then, if under- 
stood as asserting noumenal causality, may be true. 
But, on the other hand, the antithesis too must 
be true, not in its negative part, as absolutely de- 
nying noumenal causality, but in its positive part, 
as affirming the universal presence among phenom- 
ena, viewed as such, i.e. as in time, of that which is 



THE FUTILITY OF ''METAPHYSICS." 247 

called natural causation. The action of the nou- 
menal cause must not be so construed or conceived 
as to interfere with the universal operation (to 
speak in a figure) of natural law. In so far as 
phenomena universally are viewed as having the 
efficient ground of their existence in the noumenal, 
this limitation can cause us no embarrassment. 
The law of natural causation is not the law of the 
production of phenomena, but only of their order 
in time. No prejudice whatever is clone to the 
universality of this law by the hypothesis that each 
phenomenon, taken singly, or all phenomena, taken 
collectively, have the productive ground of their 
existence in a noumenal realm of real causes. On 
the contrary, the phenomena, on this hypothesis, 
being dependent for their existence on the noume- 
nal cause or causes, the law of their order must 
also, in the last resort, be derived from the same 
source. And so. in the case of man, in particular, 
we shall have no difficulty in regarding the ;; in- 
telligible character" of each individual as the true 
arid noumenal cause of the ;; empirical character." 
Since, now, it is only the empirical character which 
is involved in sensuous conditions, or appears in, 
and as part of, the phenomenal universe, man in his 
intelligible character is independent of these condi- 
tions. In this negative sense he may possess " trans- 
cendental freedom," or a power of determining 
" the series of phenomenal conditions " by a kind of 
causality which is absolutely independent of such 
conditions. 



248 kant's critique of pure reason. 

The only remaining question, which involves an 
apparent difficulty, is this: Can man, in his intel- 
ligible character, as a true and noumenal cause, 
really will and effectuate a phenomenal result which 
was not predetermined or predeterminable by nat- 
ural law? Is there any particular, visible action 
of his, which could not have been predicted by any 
one possessed of an intellect capacious enough to 
take in all the data of the phenomenal universe at 
any preceding moment and then to calculate before- 
hand, on the basis of his knowledge of purely natu- 
ral laws, what must be the whole state of the 
universe at the time when the particular action in 
question should occur, or become ''visible"? And 
if not, is man, can he be, really and properly free? 

To this, Kant's only reply consists in the re- 
minder that phenomena, not being things-in-them- 
selves, are also " not causes-in-themselves," whence 
we are apparently to draw the conclusion that no 
visible action of man, any more than any other 
phenomenon, is strictly caused or necessitated by 
preceding phenomena as such. Causation, strictly 
speaking, is not a phenomenal or sensible concep- 
tion, and the same is to be said of the conception 
of necessitation or restraint. In spite, therefore, 
of the universal reign of law, man's freedom, which 
belongs to him only as an intelligible being, and 
not as an empirical or phenomenal one, is declared 
to be negatively possible, or not in conflict with 
natural law. For a cause can be hindered or con- 
strained in its action only by that which is like 



THE FUTILITY OF "METAPHYSICS." 249 

itself, i.e. by another cause; and neither phenomena 
nor the laws of phenomena are real causes. 

Thus both thesis and antithesis of the third an- 
tinomy may, it is argued, possibly be true. 

Finally, the conflict of assertion in the Fourth 
Antinomy is capable of receiving a solution similar 
to that given to the third. The possible truth of 
both thesis and antithesis may be maintained, if we 
confine the assertion of the former to things nou- 
menal. and that of the latter to things phenomenal. 
Phenomena are not things, but "ideas (Vorsteiliin- 
gen) of things."' Phenomena are all contingent, 
and, on the other hand, " their very contingence 
itself is only a phenomenon. '' There is no alter- 
native given us but to regard them as such, without 
exception, — each phenomenon contingent upon a 
preceding phenomenon, and so on in a regressus of 
indefinite extent. From such data, the antithesis is 
right in denying the possibility of proving the re- 
ality of some absolutely non-contingent and neces- 
sary form, whether of phenomenal or of noumenal 
existence. The insubstantial is as such no proof of 
the absolutely substantial. But, on the other hand, 
it furnishes no disproof of it. Only, if we assume, 
for whatever reason, the existence of absolute sub- 
stance (or of a ;; necessary being "), we must assume 
and assert it as purely intelligible, and not phe- 
nomenal or sensible. With these limitations, we 
may assert, without contradiction, in the thesis the 
noumenal reality of a necessary being, and, in the 
antithesis, its phenomenal unreality. Both may in 



250 KANT'S critique of puke reason. 

this sense be true. But the truth of the thesis is 
incapable of theoretical demonstration. Such dem- 
onstration, nevertheless, metaphysics has attempted 
by a number of arguments which must now be 
considered under a separate head. 

III. 

EATIOXAL THEOLOGY. 

In attempting to prove that God exists, what 
does metaphysics attempt to prove? How does it 
conceive and define the object of its proof? What 
is its notion of "God"? Of what object, real or 
alleged, is " Rational Theology " the real or pre- 
tended science? 

In the interest of philosophy and of the living 
fact on which alone philosophy can rest, we must, 
before attending to Kant's criticism of Rational 
Theology, be permitted to say that God can be con- 
ceived, defined, and demonstrated, only as he is first 
known. And he is and can be known only as 
Spirit. And he can be and is thus known by man, 
only because man is spirit. Man, considered per se, 
or according to his true intention and characteristic 
nature, is a spirit, his knowledge is the process of a 
spirit, or is spiritual knowledge, and the perfect 
object of his knowledge, as such, must and can only 
be of kindred nature. The real, positive and in- 
structive purport of all that Kant accomplishes for 
the science of knowledge, in the earlier, constructive 
portion of his work, consists, as must have been 
perceived, in the demonstration that that which is 



THE FUTILITY OF "METAPHYSICS." 2ol 

called physical knowledge, and which appears at 
first to consist only in a mechanical relation be- 
tween knowing subject and known object, implies, 
as its condition, spiritual knowing, or the unifying, 
illuminating, all-pervading activity of ^//-conscious- 
ness. All of man's knowledge is thus spiritually 
conditioned. He knows the world — this lesson we 
may derive from Kant — only because and so far as 
he finds himself in the objects which the world 
presents, i.e. only because and so far as the world 
is steeped in and exists through the present power 
and life of spirit, and so exhibits, in object-fashion, 
the rational and orderly, or synthetic, forms which 
can alone correspond with the forms of a spirit's 
subjective knowing activity. Further, his knowl- 
edge of the physical universe is a relative, incom- 
plete, imperfect, non-absolute kind of knowledge, in 
this sense, namely, that man does not find in the 
universe as such the whole object which his nature 
fits and requires him to know. He finds there, in 
other words, the life and power and forms of spirit. 
but not spirit per se, not absolute spirit, complete 
and without qualification. In his knowledge or 
consciousness of the world, man finds indeed his 
"other"'; but this other, while his, i.e. while formed 
of the web and woof of a spiritual nature which 
is his also, is yet less, in point of fulness of spiritual 
being, than himself. On the other hand, in his 
knowledge or consciousness of absolute Spirit, if 
such he have, man finds again his ,; other." but 
truer and more complete than before. He finds 



252 rant's critique of pure reason. 

not only himself, he finds that which is more than 
himself, by as much as the perfect is more than 
the imperfect. For man is imperfect spirit; he is 
spirit in process of self-realization; and in his con- 
sciousness of absolute Spirit he is conscious of the 
transcendent, living ideal and type of his true, com- 
pleted, spiritual self. (It is on the hypothesis of 
this consciousness that the rationality of such a 
requirement as the following alone can rest: " Be 
ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.") 
He is conscious of a divine Self, which is the pre- 
condition and goal, not only of his own, but of all 
real being. If there exist such consciousness, there 
exists the consciousness of God. And then God is 
known and conceived as a Spirit. If there be no 
such consciousness, then there is neither knowledge 
nor notion of God, but only of a vainly imagined 
abstraction (not a spirit), the reality corresponding 
to which can never be given in experience, and 
needs to, but never can, be " proved." 

We repeat, there is no valid notion of God which 
is not founded on " experience," i e., in this case, on 
man's most characteristic self- experience in his spiri- 
tual life and activities, and on the ground of such 
experience no notion of God, except as a Spirit, can 
be framed or can justly be presupposed in behalf, or 
for the purposes, of " proof." And when the notion 
is thus presupposed, the " proof" of its objective 
validity — or, that God as a Spirit "exists" — does 
not consist in deducing from given and known pre- 
mises, whether by direct or indirect demonstration, 



THE FUTILITY OF "METAPHYSICS." 253 

a conclusion respecting an extramundane being 
who is far off, and out of the immediate reach of 
all premises, because out of the reach of all expe- 
rience, and of whom nought is knowable except in 
this roundabout way; it consists — to express the 
matter in substantial agreement with Aristotle and 
with all positive religious philosophy — in clearing 
up the mental vision, so that the human spirit may 
become explicitly aware of that which is implicitly 
contained in its own living experience, or so that 
it may really see what it knows and know what it 
sees. "Demonstrable" means "capable of being 
shown" or " immediately pointed out"; and in the 
way just described, God, as a Spirit, comes to be 
recognized as the present and immediate, universal, 
living and demonstrable precondition and goal of 
all our life and all our consciousness, be the object 
of the latter ostensibly man, God, or world. 

Moreover, the process, by which religious philoso- 
phy recognizes and demonstrates God as a Spirit, is 
founded in the science of knowledge as a spiritual 
process, and not merely, as sensational psychology 
regards it, a mechanical one. We have seen hereto- 
fore that the act of knowing, as a spiritual process, 
i.e. in its true and completed nature, is an act where- 
by those terms of apparent opposition, subject and 
object, which at first thought seem to be only and 
absolutely opposed and incapable of conjunction, are 
brought into harmonious union and identity of na- 
ture. And the further analysis of the case shows 
that this reduction of opposites to unity is not an 



254 rant's critique of pure reason. 

arbitrary act on our part, — such that, without the 
act, the opposed terms would have remained in eter- 
nal and absolute opposition. No, the finite act of 
knowing, on man's part, is simply equivalent to a 
demonstration that from the beginning and from 
everlasting the opposition was only relative, and 
that the appearance of absolute opposition would not 
have existed for us, but for the original restriction 
of our point of view within purely mechanical, sen- 
sible, and finite limits. So God, as a Spirit, and as 
the absolute object of knowledge, comes to be con- 
ceived and known, not as pure subject, nor as pure 
object, but as the everlasting precondition of the 
distinction between subject and object, as the pre- 
sent condition of their possible synthesis in our 
knowledge, and as the one in whom this synthesis is 
eternally and completely actualized. In short, God, 
as a Spirit, is that which only a spirit is capable of 
being; he is in his nature subject, plus object, plus 
the absolute organic unity and identity of both in 
an everlasting synthesis of life, which is absolute 
energy of mind and of love. Thus alone is he capa- 
ble of being the "author 1 ' of the " world," which, 
ideally and strictly defined, consists, first of all, in 
nothing but the apparent and partial diremption of 
subject and object, and, then, in a process, the law 
of which is but the law of the restoration of the 
separated terms to that unity in which alone the 
true nature of each is completed. God, as a Spirit, 
is the author of a world which is nothing but a 
process of the evolution or realization of spirit. 



THE FUTILITY OF " METAPHYSICS." 255 

Quite otherwise is it with the preconceptions and 
method of that ' ; rational psychology " of dogmatic, 
mechanical, sense conditioned " metaphysics, 1 ' which 
Kant describes and combats. This " metaphysics " 
does not first know and acknowledge God as a Spirit. 
And this because it is not in possession of the com- 
pleted science of knowledge and of experience, as a 
spiritual process. Its categories are all mechanistic. 
They are suggested by the apparent relation of 
opposition between subject and object, which sub- 
sists in sensible consciousness. God, therefore, not 
being subject in this relation, must be object. Xot 
being identical with the immediate, and, as such, 
necessarily phenomenal object of sensible conscious- 
ness, he must be a ;t particular object/' distinct and 
separate from the former; he is a "transcendental 
thing"! Such is the constantly recurring phrase- 
ology of Kant — who, it need scarcely be said, agrees 
with the " metaphysicians " that, if God is to be 
" theoretically " or " scientifically " demonstrated, it 
can only be by the way which they have chosen. 

Space was shown in the Transcendental JEstheiic 
to be the precondition of all figures in space. The 
latter were conceivable only as " limitations " of a 
space already given. In like manner, " metaphy- 
sics" argues that all objects possessing "reality" 
exist and are possible only as limitations of an ori- 
ginal plenum of reality. This way of looking at 
things is, as Kant argues, perfectly legitimate, when 
the object of our contemplation is the phenomenal 
world; — though even here the plenum would have 



256 kant's critique of pure reasox. 

to be considered, not as absolute, but only as in- 
definitely great. But metaphysics looks upon phe- 
nomena as things-in-themselves, and so transfers, 
illegitimately, the above conception into the un- 
known realm of noumena. Thus it forms for itself 
a notion of absolute substance, which, as containing 
within itself the sum of all reality, may be termed 
ens realissiinam. This ens is, however, at this point, 
incapable of further definition or description than 
this, namely, that it is absolute object. But then 
the consideration of the contingency of everything 
in the universe leads metaphysics to look on this 
being as ens originarium, or as the unconditioned 
ground, cause, or reason of the possibility and of 
the dependent existence of the finite universe, from 
which latter it is deistically considered as absolutely 
separate. Thus " hypostatizing our Idea, we go 
on to define the original Being as one, simple, all- 
sufficient, eternal, etc., beirg guided in our defini- 
tions by nothing but our conception of supreme 
reality. The conception of such a Being is the 
transcendental conception of God." It is " the Ideal 
of pure reason" and "the subject of a transcen- 
dental Theology." 

The proofs of the existence of such a being, as 
thus defined and conceived, can be no stronger than 
the general theory of knowledge and of being, on 
the basis of which the conception is framed. Kant 
has little difficulty in showing that this basis is 
insufficient to support the theological structure os- 
tensibly reared upon it. God is viewed as an abso- 



THE FUTILITY OF "METAPHYSICS." 257 

lute " object."' The conception of a pure object 
can only come from a mechanico-sensible theory of 
knowledge, and it can consequently only obtain or 
be (partially) realized in that realm of existence or 
experience in which alone this theory finds its rela- 
tive justification. This is the realm of sensible 
experience, or of phenomena. Accordingly, if the 
existence of God as an " object" is to be proved, the 
proof must consist in pointing out that such an 
object is given in sensible experience. But this 
condition cannot be fulfilled, since, by hypothesis, 
God is a " transcendental " object, " outside the 
world " of phenomena, and consequently incapable 
of being " experimentally," i.e. sensibly, demon- 
strated. Were he thus demonstrable, he were no 
longer what he was defined to be, namely, not a 
phenomenon, but a thing-in-itself. Of the existence 
of such a " transcendental thing " neither proof nor 
disproof is possible. 

This is the substance of all of Kant's criticisms 
upon the arguments for God's existence. Of these 
arguments he enumerates and considers three, the 
Ontological, the Cosmological, and the Physico-theo- 
logical (or Teleological). 

1. The Ontological Argument is alleged to assert 
that it is at least possible — not contradictory in 
se — to frame the notion of an ens realissimum. 
This being is conceived as possessed of all reality. 
Hence it must be conceived as possessed of existence, 
for "all reality" includes "existence." To conceive 
it as not existing, were to conceive it as possessing 



258 kant's critique of pure reasox. 

less than all reality. The " thing " corresponding 
to this conception (namely, ; * God ") must therefore 
exist, since it cannot be conceived as not existing. 

Kant replies, in substance, that the conception 
of existence and the fact of existence are two very 
different things, so that no inference is possible from 
the one to the other. Whatever I conceive ( — sen- 
sibly imagine), I necessarily conceive as though it 
were existing. Though my pocket be empty, I may 
conceive it to contain a " hundred thalers." If I 
conceive them there, I conceive them and can only 
conceive them as existing there. This is a truism. 
But the fact that I am under this manifest necessity 
of so conceiving, by no means, alas! carries with it 
the necessity that a hundred thalers should really 
be in my pocket. Whether they are really there or 
not is a matter of fact, which I can only determine 
by sensible experience. In no other way can the 
question of fact, as to whether an ens realissimnm, 
corresponding to the conception of such a 4i being," 
exists, be determined; and this is the same as to 
say that the question is altogether incapable of de- 
termination. 

2. The Cosmological Argument contends (in Kant's 
language) that " if anything exists, there must also 
exist an absolutely necessary being. Now, at least 
I myself exist ; hence there exists an absolutely 
necessary being." This is the argument called a 
contingentia mundi. It is founded on our observa- 
tion of the contingency of all particular existence, 
and is identical, in this regard, with the argument 



THE FUTILITY OF "METAPHYSICS.' 1 259 

by which the thesis of the Fourth Antinomy was 
supported. The contingent, it is maintained, is an 
effect, depending on an antecedent condition, which 
is its cause. The same is true of the whole series of 
contingent effects, which it is not allowable to con- 
ceive as infinitely extended and which must there- 
fore have a " First Cause." Having thus jumped 
to this conclusion, the cosmological argument then 
falls back upon the ontological argument, which has 
already been disproved, and identifies the " First- 
Cause " with the ens realissimum, as the only ens, 
the conception of which meets the requirements of 
necessary existence. 

The objections to this argument were summed 
up in the proof of the antithesis in the Fourth 
Antinomy. The substance of them is simply this, 
that advantage is taken of the law of physical 
" causation," which " is of significance only within 
the sensible world," to conclude to the existence 
of a cause lying outside of this world, existing be- 
fore it, and operating only at the beginning of it. 
This is a valid objection to the cosmological argu- 
ment, so far as the latter is made to rest on tire law 
of " physical causation " as a premise. Such a law, 
as we have often enough seen, is not enough of it- 
self to lead to the cognition of any cause whatever, 
whether intra- mundane or extra-mundane, particu- 
lar or universal. Sucli a law is but a restatement 
of the given order of phenomena. On the other 
hand, it is just to repeat (and this also agrees with 
the spirit of Hegel's criticisms upon Kant) that, as 



260 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

soon as we have recognized the true conception of 
causality, we have already transcended the sensible 
world. We are already in the "intelligible world, " 
the world of power, life, and spirit, and are led to 
the recognition of a " First Cause/' not as an ante- 
cedent unconditioned condition of all contingent 
conditions, but as an ever-present " First " in power 
and being. 

3. The Physico-theological or Teleological Argu- 
ment proceeds, not from general, but from particu- 
lar, experience. It is the argument " from design." 
Nature discloses manifold signs of wise intention 
and harmonious order, and these are held to betoken 
a divine designer. 

Kant declares that " this argument deserves al- 
ways to be mentioned with respect. It is the oldest 
and clearest of all proofs, and best adapted to con- 
vince the reason of the mass of mankind. It ani- 
mates our study of nature," etc. " It were," he 
says again, " not only a cheerless, but an altogether 
vain task, to attempt to detract from the persuasive 
authority of this proof." He has " nought to urge 
against its rationality and utility." He only ques- 
tions its claim to " apodictic certainty." 

How much of design do we find in the world? 
An indefinitely great amount, no doubt, but not 
enough to warrant the assertion that a being less 
infinite and necessary in his nature, than God is 
supposed to be, might not have caused it. Besides, 
the " design " in nature affects, (to speak material- 
istically,) not the substance of things, but only the 



THE FUTILITY OF "METAPHYSICS." 261 

form. It could at most, therefore, only warrant the 
inference that there exists an architect of the uni- 
verse, but not a creator. Further, who shall say 
that the things of the world might not have given 
themselves the apparently intended order, in which 
they exist? To meet this difficulty, the teleological 
argument (as Kant asserts) has to fall back upon 
the cosmological argument, which makes all finite 
existence contingent, and must then proceed, via the 
defective ontological argument, to identify its world- 
architect with the supposed absolutely necessary 
being. Thus the teleological argument, logically 
insufficient by itself to prove its intended conclusion, 
has to seek a stay in other arguments, which, them- 
selves also, have been shown to constitute but a 
rope of sand. 

In short, then, all arguments to prove the exist- 
ence of God, must, in order to be theoretically valid, 
start from specifically and exclusively sensible or 
phenomenal data, must employ only the conceptions 
of " pure physical science," and must end with 
pointing out (= " de-monstraiing") in sensible expe- 
rience an "object congruous with," or corresponding 
to, the " Idea " of God. This senseless and barba- 
rous requirement can obviously not be met. Con- 
sequently the existence of an absolutely necessary 
" object, " called i; God," cannot be ' ; scientifically " 
proved. Nor — and this is the point on which Kant's 
main interest is concentrated — can it be disproved. 
Hence place is left open for us to give whatever 
weight we please, in our ;< faith," to any other, 



262 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

"'moral," though non-" scientific," proofs, which 
may present themselves to us. With this subject 
ethics, the science of practice, or of practical reason, 
will have to deal. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



METAPHYSICS AS A SCIENCE. 

OF the four particular questions, into which the 
main inquiry of the i; Critique of Pure Reason " 
was subdivided, the last was. How is Metaphysics 
as a Science possible? To this question Kant's an- 
swer is criven in the last main division of the Cri- 

o 

tique, which bears the general title of Doctrine of 
Method. The materials for the answer are supplied, 
as Kant remarks, in the foregoing chapters. What 
sort of a metaphysical structure " science, " in Kant's 
view, will permit, or enable, us to erect, how high 
and how firm, has already been substantially deter- 
mined. .The only question remaining concerns, not 
so much the material, as the plan, or form, of the 
building. 

Still, when we reflect on the negative result of 
Kant's foregoing criticism of " metaphysics," the out- 
look for metaphysics as a science must at first appear 
very unpromising. Kant has ostensibly demon- 
strated that metaphysics, as an alleged objective 
science, has no demonstrable content. According 
to this result, metaphysics cannot be the positive 
science of metaphysical objects, such as the human 
soul and God. Still the Ideas of these objects thrust 
themselves upon the mind inevitably and according 

263 



264 kant's critique of pure reason. 

to a peremptory law of reason. They are, and will 
always remain, with us and in us, and if, as Kant 
has sought to show, they tempt us to essay the im- 
possible and to seek to demonstrate by " theoreti- 
cal " arguments that objects corresponding to them 
do or do not exist, we shall always need some science 
to teach us convincingly the futility of all such 
attempts. Accordingly the first part of Metaphysics 
as a science will consist in, and is by Kant entitled, 
the " Discipline of Pure Reason. " It will consist in 
the systematic proof that metaphysics can scientifi- 
cally demonstrate nothing whatever, whether pro or 
con, respecting the existence of its ideal objects. 

The section on the " Discipline of Pure Reason 1 ' 
contains, first, an emphatic affirmation and demon- 
stration of the truth that " geometry and philoso- 
phy are two very different things." The first grand 
service rendered by Kant to philosophy consists pre- 
cisely in the fact that he brought the aforesaid truth 
clearly into the consciousness of the modern mind. 
Leibnitz, before Kant, had been aware of it, and had 
distinctly uttered it. But in this respect he stood 
alone among the leaders of modern thought. Des- 
cartes and Spinoza, Hobbes and Locke, Wolff, Leib- 
nitz's own nominal successor, and many others, had 
been, either expressly or practically, of a different 
opinion. The mathematical method, which is the 
ideal of method for physical science, must, they 
had held, be made the method of pure philosophy. 
Kant showed with absolute clearness that the mathe- 
matical method is applicable only within the science 



METAPHYSICS AS A SCIENCE. 265 

of sensible phenomena as such, or of the forms of 
space and time, which are themselves but the uni- 
versal, conditioning forms of sensible phenomena. 
Wherever this method is or can be applied, sensible 
phenomena and their universal forms of space and 
time are presupposed as already given. The inquiry 
is here not respecting the absolute source, cause or 
meaning of phenomena and of space and time, but 
simply respecting that which space and time ideally 
(as in mathematics) or empirically (as in physical 
science) contain. The inquiry thus excluded is ex- 
actly the one which occupies philosophy; philosophy, 
or metaphysics proper, asks not after the phenom- 
enal, but after the noumenal which is assumed to 
be in or " behind," and to explain, the phenomenal. 
For the purposes of such investigation it is plain 
that the method of mathematics and pure physical 
science, which regards only the phenomenal and its 
conditions and serves only for analytic recognition 
of that which is already given in them, cannot serve 
at all. Any attempts to employ it for such purposes 
must end in logical discomfiture and illusion. And 
this is what Kant has really shown in his " Trans- 
cendental Dialectic." 

The setting up of complete, initial definitions and 
of axioms, and the success ful accomplishment of apo- 
dictic demonstrations, are possible for mathematics, 
because its objects are all given, or capable of being 
constructed and set immediately before the mind, 
in the forms of sensible imagination, and may be 
further illustrated by concrete figures and symbols. 



266 kant's critique of puke reason. 

Here definition and demonstration consist respect- 
ively, in stating and pointing out (showing, recog- 
nizing) what is contained in an object immediately 
given, or capable of being given, either in the mat- 
ter or in the form of sensibly conditioned, objective 
consciousness. In philosophy, on the contrary, the 
subjects of discussion and proposed objects of demon- 
stration are given, according to Kant, only in the 
form of pure conceptions, Ideas, or ideals. Here 
definition cannot, as in mathematics, stand at the 
beginning of the inquiry, since the objects corre- 
sponding to its pure conceptions are not, and cannot 
be, given or presented to the mind in the forms of 
sensible consciousness. For the same reason it is 
held that theoretical demonstration in pure meta- 
physics is impossible. Metaphysics can therefore only 
give partial or problematical definitions of its ob- 
jects. Or indeed, to speak accurately, or from the 
point of view of pure theoretical (= in Kant's view, 
mathematico- sensible) knowledge, the ontological 
definitions of metaphysics must be purely negative 
and can only consist in attributing to the subject 
of definition, as predicates, the simple negation of 
the attributes of all that can strictly be known, 
i.e. of sensible phenomena and their subjective form- 
conditions of space and time. Accordingly, the ways 
of mathematico-physical science are not, as such, the 
ways of metaphysics as a science. But the former 
are the only ways of objective demonstration and 
of knowledge, in the exact and proper sense of the 
term. Hence it follows (1) that, on the basis of 



METAPHYSICS AS A SCIENCE. 2G7 

mathematical and physical science and with its meth- 
od, no metaphysical conclusions, whether pro or con, 
can be substantiated, — the premises are irrelevant 
to the conclusion; and (2) that metaphysics as an ob- 
jective, theoretical science, furnishing positive, scien- 
tific knowledge of metaphysical objects, is impossible. 
Metaphysics, as a true science, can consist, in Kant's 
view, first of all, in nothing but the positive demon- 
stration, such as the "Critique of Pure Reason" is 
held to furnish, of the foregoing negative conclu- 
sions. 

But the practical result of this demonstration is 
for Kant by no means simply negative. It is not 
mere scepticism. Scepticism, he urges, is only a 
temporary halting-place for pure reason, not its final 
dwelling-place. Pure reason is not only theoretical, 
it is also practical. It is not only receptively cogni- 
tive, it is also- legislative. Man finds himself con- 
fronted with one, and that indeed ■" the only fact of 
pure reason,' 1 to wit, the fact of conscious and abso- 
lute obligation to conform to a moral law, which is 
not of sense or nature, but of the mind and spirit; 
which is not, like natural law, simply declaratory of 
what actually and sensibly takes, or has taken, place, 
but of what ought to take place, — or of what man 
is under absolute moral obligation to do, even though 
he never do it; and which results from a legislation 
in which man's own reason autonomically partici- 
pates. Hence arises for man the absolute practical 
necessity of regarding himself as possessing a nature, 
and belonging to a world, which are more than sen- 



268 kant's critique of pure reason. 

sible, — which are moral, and intelligible, and whose 
law is reason; a world, in which man is free and 
responsible, and the subject of an immortal destiny; 
and of which, finally, the monarch is God, who, by 
adjusting the conditions of happiness according to 
man's never-ending progress in the desert of it, 
makes possible for him the final attainment of his 
perfect good. But, also, on the other hand, there 
arises in the same way the absolute practical need 
of revising our conception of universal nature, so 
that we may regard it as a realm of purposes and 
find in it " purposeful unity," thus uniting practical 
with speculative reason. The demonstration in de- 
tail of these two consequences and of all that for 
Kant is involved in them, is furnished, respective^, 
in Kant's ethical works and in his "Critique of the 
Faculty of Judgment." Of these we have not to 
treat.* Suffice it to say here that while, according 
to Kant, no legitimate " theoretical use " of reason 
(as distinguished from the scientific understanding 
and from sense) is possible, there exists a broad 
field for its " practical employment." And the 
positive value of the "Discipline of Pure Season" 
consists for him in the circumstance, that by it it 
is made forever impossible to close the gate of en- 
trance into this field. Would any adversary seek 
to close it through demonstration of its non-exist- 
ence — i.e. by theoretically demonstrating the non- 
existence of freedom, immortality, and God, — the 

* These subjects are to be treated in separate volumes belonging 
to the same series with the present one. 



METAPHYSICS AS A SCIENCE. 269 

aforesaid discipline at once lays him low. The 
same difficulties which prevent us from theoreti- 
cally demonstrating the reality of freedom, immor- 
tality, and God, just as effectively debar the denier 
from any prospect of proving the contrary. Thus 
there is no obstacle whatever in the way of our 
building up, through the practical use of reason, 
a " rational belief," according to our moral neces- 
sities. For such practical use it will be the second 
part of the business of metaphysics as a science to 
furnish the "Canon," or "the system of a priori 
principles." 

In the third place, all scientific knowledge is 
systematic, and takes the form of a complex, but 
orderly, whole. Metaphysics has, accordingly, for the 
third part of its legitimate work, to determine the 
systematic order and articulation of all rational 
knowledge, or of all the principles of pure reason, 
and of their various applications. This Kant briefly 
discusses under the title of "Architectonic of Pure 
Reason." 

Finally, scientific metaphysics may consider the 
"History of Pure Reason." To this topic Kant 
devotes only three pages of the Critique, and with 
these concludes his work. Looking back over the 
century which has passed since it was written, and 
recalling with what conspicuous assiduity the study 
of philosophy in its history has during this time — 
in marked contrast with the neglect of the subject 
in the two preceding centuries — been prosecuted, 
the brief and, in itself considered, quite unimpor- 



270 KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 

tant tribute to the importance of the subject, with 
which Kant ends his first great work, suggests pecu- 
liar reflections. It reminds us of the truth men- 
tioned in our Introduction, that the horizon of 
Kant's views and knowledge in philosophy was not 
as broad as the horizon of philosophy's history, nor, 
consequently, as the horizon of philosophy itself. 
His horizon was principally determined for him, at 
the beginning, by modern physical science, and then, 
more especially, by the formalistic dogmatism of the 
Wolffian " metaphysics," the negativism of Hume, 
and the ethical empiricism of the British moralists. 
But then Kant's original horizon was as extended as 
that of his contemporaries and of his more immedi- 
ate predecessors (Leibnitz being excepted) in modern 
times generally. For this reason, the service which 
Kant rendered was peculiarly a service relative to 
his times, or to the state of modern philosophy gen- 
erally down to his time. For this reason, too, Kant's 
struggle, of which the " Critique of Pure Reason " is 
a partial history, with the powers of intellectual pre- 
judice and confusion, was a struggle to become the 
intellectual redeemer of his times. In no other way 
could this redemption be accomplished than by an 
independent movement from within outwards, — that 
is to say, by a movement starting from the point of 
view of the time, however narrow this might be, 
and proceeding, with no other guide than the nature 
of the case under consideration itself, so far as this 
permitted itself to be immediately discovered, out 
toward the region of larger light and more catholic 



METAPHYSICS AS A SCIENCE. 271 

comprehension. Such a movement we have seen 
Kant leading. And now, at the end of his first 
great critical work, we seem to see him catching a 
glimpse — more than half unconscious, it is true — 
of that land of historic truth which, truly considered, 
is, in its measure, the " region of larger light and 
more catholic comprehension " in question. The 
grand outlines and conditions of that perfected sci- 
ence of knowledge, and so of being, toward the 
reestablishment of which Kant was unconsciously 
working, existed already in history. The grand 
problem, upon a part of which Kant was laboring, 
had already been considered and in essence solved 
bv Plato and Aristotle. The modern reinvestigation 
of the problem was carried on, however, in compara- 
tive independence of history, by Kant's immediate 
successors, Fichte and Schelling (the latter in his 
earlier works). He who practically closed the dis- 
cussion, (until it should be begun anew.) namely, 
Hegel, discovered and demonstrated that the new 
result was but the repetition, in completer form and 
richer detail, of an old one previoush" reached in 
substance. The new result confirmed the whole his- 
tory of philosophy, broadly and scientifically consid- 
ered, and the whole history of philosophy confirmed 
the new result. 

Kant, with reference to his times and to the nar- 
rower point of view which his unhistoric age forced 
upon him. was undoubtedly in the right, when, in 
the last paragraph of his book, rejecting as in- 
effectual the " dogmatic method " of the i; celebrated 



272 kant's critique of pure reason. 

Wolff" and the " sceptical method of David Hume," 
and practically treating these two as the only meth- 
ods having historic existence, he confidently recom- 
mended the "critical way,"" and declared: 

" The critical way alone is still open. If the 
reader has had the courtesy and patience to wander 
through it in my company, he may now judge 
whether, if he will contribute his share towards 
making this foot-path a highway, that, which many 
centuries could not accomplish, may not be attained 
before the lapse of the present century, namely, the 
complete satisfaction of human reason respecting 
those problems which have at all times aroused its 
curiosity, though hitherto in vain." 

Fifty-one years after these words were written 
Hegel died. Meanwhile the world witnessed the 
most arduous, comprehensive and influential move- 
ment of philosophic thought which had taken place 
since the days of the classic Greek philosophy. The 
" courage of knowledge " was absolute. Kant's pro- 
phecy seemed to have been fulfilled. 



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